REVIEW: Maria [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 124 minutes
Release Date: November 27th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Pablo Larraín
Writer(s): Steven Knight

I took liberties all my life and life took liberties with me.

It’s the final week of Maria Callas’ (Angelina Jolie) life and her trusted butler (Pierfrancesco Favino’s Ferruccio) and housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher’s Bruna) are being made to move the deck chairs on the Titanic by way of her piano. She says that it needs to be moved to the other window to better “suit her purposes,” but the only purpose she has is to punish them for daring to care about her well-being. Someone must, though, considering she won’t do it herself. Yet the air throughout Pablo Larraín’s Maria says none of them are under any delusion that a recovery is possible.

Written by Steven Knight, this stylish account is full of pills and singing: two things that will only exacerbate her failing heart. The pills because she won’t follow any actual prescriptions while hiding the true amount of what she’s taken from anyone who asks. The singing because the stress opera takes on her body has become too much to bear. “Do you know how difficult it is to pull the music from your stomach out through your mouth?!” is what she screams back at a “fan” whose night was ruined many years ago when she canceled a show due to illness (the validity of which was questioned by the media). And the more she pushes herself, the less she can reliably believe her own eyes.

That’s how we learn about the life leading towards this inevitable curtain call. Maria is hallucinating so often that she can barely differentiate fact from fiction until something rips her away from the fantasy. This duality occurs via a filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) seeking to put her truth on the record. He arrives to interview her with questions she wants to answer—questions that transport her back to when she was a child, attached to Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), and transforming her pain and sorrow into music the world adored. We watch her lucidly partake in these flashbacks before falling victim to the disorientation that occurs when living the recollection changes to reminiscing about it with adoring fans and, finally, to her sitting in an empty room.

It’s at once joyous and tragic. We see the love Maria possesses and the abuse inflicted upon her. There’s the fight for autonomy against her mother, her lovers, and her fans as everyone looks to claim ownership over who she was, is, and can become. Only Ferruccio and Bruna are truly on her side. Yes, because they are paid to be, but also because they want to too. We see it in the way they placate her need for approval and ignore her demands to be left alone when it comes to her health. But mostly we see it in the way they protect her from external forces and herself. It’s brief and quickly deflected, but I’m so glad we eventually get a purely candid moment between the three. It’s my favorite scene.

The whole is imbued with similar flourishes as Larraín’s other English-language heightened biographies, Jackie and Spencer, to find its narrative thrust landing somewhere between the former’s poetic realism and latter’s evocative fantasy. By moving back and forth between reality and illusion, he and Knight can string Callas’ history together with emotive touchstones while evolving from small moments of reevaluation to bigger ones. They’re giving their subject the means to reclaim her identity. To find the strength and confidence to accept what she’s done and what was done to her on this journey towards one final aria. Not to fight back or prove anything to the world. But to achieve inner peace.

There’s a real beauty to that. A simplicity too—one augmented by the fact that no one pretends a happy ending is coming (not even the film considering we start at the end before rewinding seven days). Sure, everyone tries to wish for it, but they know not to get their hopes up. All Maria needs is to stand long enough to travel through her thoughts and find the ones she must confront. She needs only to sing one song a day to not strain her body too much while working towards the show-stopping finale of her very existence. And Jolie is up to the task of bringing this enigmatic force of nature to life. Maybe her Maria didn’t start on her own terms, but she will definitely end on them.