
Opera Meets Film: The Tragedy of Pablo Larraín’s ‘Maria’ (Review)
By John VandevertWhat is life if it’s not lived? Maria, “La Divina,” Callas lived a life which could fill 100 and yet, she kept going until her form could no longer sustain itself under the gravitas of her vitality. Having starred in her only film, “Medea“ (1969), producing some of the most important masterclass recordings of operatic history at Juilliard in New York (1971-1972), one of those students being Barbara Hendricks, and going on an international tour to reassert herself as our “La Divina” (1973-1974), the 1970s were nothing short of full. Those masterclasses were, according to her, a failure as later commenting that artistic internal life could not be manufactured or taught but instead cultured from an innate quality. Interestingly, while still in New York, she was offered the position of artistic director at the Metropolitan Opera House, something she declined. This was a choice which could have changed everything.
Nevertheless, Callas the director, rather than performer, was something blossoming in her life, in 1973 making her directorial debut in a production of “I Vespri Siciliani“ at Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. However, it was not as celebrated as it could have been among critics and that potential road off the stage into the wings was closed.
But also in those wings, off the stage, away from the public gaze and critical scrutiny, many overlapping events clouded what should have been a promising final reinvention of the Callas figure for her and the world of opera itself.* Officially distancing herself from life and work within the United States in 1966 when she renounced her citizenship, this act of symbolic closure to her marriage to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, or “Titta,” paved a new way for the independence once enjoyed by “La Divina.” Two years later, her relationship with Aristotle Socrates Onassis also ‘officially’ closed when in 1968 he married Jacqueline Kennedy, and while independent, that lack of familial relations, something which had been strained in Callas’s life, was beginning to become untenable.
Callas carried guilt when she was younger as she thought she had broken her family up but, as it turned out, her mother was something outside of Callas’s responsibility and as such, music became her family, her world, her life. This continued until her final years, the oscillation between relations and art, and while during the 1960s, the leitmotif was reconciliation and renewal of Callas the person, during the 1970s it was time for the renewal of Callas as “La Divina.” The tension between these two worlds proliferated throughout her life until her death on September 16, 1977. Her final private moments with pianist Vasso Devetzi were some of the most difficult. However, it was more than admitting the deterioration of her voice but the loss of identity that made Callas lose her place in the world, neither identifying with her Greecian roots, American life, Italian experiences, or her French life.
This was Maria Callas’s final experience of life on Earth, having officially become one of the world’s most famous opera stars, known across the world by everyone from governmental officials, laymen, and cultural elite to journalists, critics, and colleagues in less than 30 years. But, in the end, Callas left the world alone, however on her own terms, in her way, never compromising to anyone and neither escaping from the pain nor looking for false hope. She remained “La Divina” until the moment she was finally relieved of her suffering. In the many portrayals of “La Divina” in cinema and theatre, from “Maria Callas: Living and Dying for Art and Love” (2004) and “Callas” (1988) to “7 Deaths of Maria Callas“ (2020) and “Maria by Callas“ (2017), many different version of her final moments are portrayed. However, recent biopic films like “Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs“ (2023), and “Maria Callas“ (2024) have aptly demonstrated that some understand “La Divina” more than others.
What happens when an ineffable, enigmatic, contradictory, self-aware, formidable, loving, persistent, passionate, self-conscious, sensitive, uncompromising, forthright, downright cryptic figure such as “La Divina” is portrayed by an actress who does not fully understand who she is portraying? One gets “Maria“ (2024), the new film by Pablo Larraín which, as of January 2025, has received countless accolades by the establishment yet disapproval by devotees and fans of Callas. The question becomes, whose version of “La Divina” will win over others?
It is no secret I thoroughly disapprove of any and all biopics, “Maria” included, for their usual dishonesty in portraying the lives of their figures. However, when it comes to Hollywood and their attempts, my disdain only grows, and for “Maria” I have less than no words to describe the incredible disservice they did to our Goddess of Art, our “La Divina.” But my hostility only grows against the movie when taking into account how the establishment lauded the film without even a slight attempt to nurture the idea that Larraín and his lead actress, Angelina Jolie, failed to take the correct position on “La Divina.” That is, making a film which focuses on Maria the real woman rather than Callas the tabloid sensation which would, unfortunately, entail finding an actress capable of giving something other than a stoic, distanced, and lethargic performance of a figure anything BUT apathetic and sluggish.
I completely concur with one commenter’s thought, “Umm so apparently the film’s director & the beautiful Ms. Jolie thought that a vague & vacuous expression would create an impression of La Divina on stage?” The idea that subtle nuances and slight movements of the eyes, wrists, grasping the chest, unnatural movements of the lips, was the best way to capture Callas rather than grand gestures motivated by real emotion is already a step in the wrong direction. It’s no secret that Jolie looks nothing like “La Divina,” and why a non-opera singer was cast when we have Sonya Radvanovsky, Agnes Baltsa, Rosa Feola, and Laura Polverelli seems motivated by money and sales.
Lest you think I’m alone in my stalwart rejection of the film on the basis of its highly insufficient portrayal of “La Divina,” comments from fans online have stated similar thoughts, “what she did is nothing else than a badly acted and a badly tasted caricatural parody of the great Callas.” More vocal critics like Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Times were particularly incensed by the fact that, despite Jolie’s efforts to learn operatic technique, the lip-syncing was suboptimal at best. I am among the many, many, who oppose the film if only because of the lifelessness of Jolie’s often empty eyes throughout the film, where she stares at something but conveys absolutely nothing, at times embodying colloquial movements at highly inappropriate times, one of those being the truly unfortunate portrayal of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” specifically the harrowingly difficult Act three “Mad Scene.”
In reality, recordings of this are some of her best in her extensive recording oeuvre, her 1958 London recording a particular favorite of mine. This is only the tip of the very elongated, submerged, iceberg as, outside of Jolie’s performance deficits, dramaturgic insufficiencies, and vocal inabilities, the very architecture of the film and its structure was wrong, constructed from alleged facts and missing truths. As one passionate fan strongly observed, “Callas no longer had the voice she once had but…this reproduction is pathetic and unbearably false.”
A central polemic of the film is Pablo Larraín’s disinterest in real life or fact, instead opting in for a tragic and woefully disingenuous alternative where Callas is a victim of circumstance rather than a brazen defender of her sovereignty as both a woman and artist. The plot starts with her death on September 16, 1977, and works backwards during her final years in Paris. After Callas’s official end to her stage career in 1965, her life did not stop as the film seems to suggest, nor did the failure of her final tour from 1971 to 1972 “kill” her as the film would have you think. Instead, mounting health problems exacerbated by her continuous goal of extreme weight loss, among other things, led to her death, but NOT before recovering and having some recording ventures to look forward to.
The film spends far too much time dealing with her romantic relationships which, as any knowledgeable “La Divina” fan will know, did make up at least a third of Callas’s life-long difficulties but it was not the central problem. As I said before, her loss of personal identity, a place to call home, a voice, all combined to create a situation positively untenable for anyone to bear. In many ways, Callas needed her voice to find herself, she needed art as one needs religion, and without it, she became stuck in a perpetual state of unresolvable sehnsucht, an intense state of waiting in anticipation for a moment that is never coming. By choosing to not center this vital aspect of Callas’s final moments, Larraín fails to convey why Callas became hopeless, listless, and aloof from herself and others by 1977.
The unraveling of Callas’s psychological life from 1971 to 1977 would have made a far better film as stated in a 1974 interview with Mike Wallace, Callas made a sobering comment, “I’m at peace with myself and I accept myself.” Was she lying, did she really feel at ease, or was this hiding something far more difficult? These questions have been answered by many in many different ways and unfortunately, Larraín remains aloof, instead using Callas’s relationships to tell a story which Callas deserves to say on her own terms, not Hollywoods. One commenter made a startling observation, “I think we have to look at one pervasive cultural phenomenon which is: why do we use present-day representatives, i.e. actors, singers, musicians etc. to try and re-create the memory of one who was truly great?” To say Jolie and Larraín botched their parts in a movie that never needed to be made would be a gross understatement. And, like many of her fellow mature female contemporaries like Tilda Swinton, Blake Lively, and Julianne Moore, Jolie’s performance under Larraín was distant, cold, ineffective, and downright offensive.
When push came to shove, there was no craving for another Callas biopic by those who really love “La Divina” given the countless documentaries, recordings, pictures, and real clips of footage publicly available. I am left stupefied by the critical adoration of the film, from star-studded reviews in the New York Times, The Guardian, Rotten Tomatoes, and The Independent. It is clear that Maria Callas’s fan base were ignored and because of this, I cannot help but summarize my thoughts on the film in this way: “Maria” by Pablo Larraín is a film made not for “La Divina” devotees but the uninitiated and artistically unaware given its distasteful portrayal of a multi-dimensional woman unable to be portrayed by anyone other than her. Alison Willmore of Vulture echoes my thoughts,
“But despite the obvious effort that went into the making of ‘Maria,’ there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked.”
The strongest attribute of the film were the real documentary footage during the credits when we, her loving fans, could finally see her for who she really was without the Hollywood whitewashing getting in the way. At the end of the day, if someone wants to know more about Callas, all you have to do is watch performances, read her biography, listen to her, and experience “La Divina” as she was, not as the mainstream would like her to be. Listen and really enjoy her legendary 1959 Hamburg concert and you will experience “La Divina” in all her, factual, glory.
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* For more, see Lyndsy Spence, Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas (England: The History Press, 2021)