Pablo Larrain's MARIA: Great Callas' Ghost

Pablo Larrain's latest film, Maria,  begins at the very end of the sad life of legendary soprano, Maria Callas.  Through the long shot  of a camera we see Maria's doctor, butler, medics, and the police waiting for her body to be taken away.  All seem as if in prayer, as an actual prayer - or rather an operatic one - Desdemona's Ave Maria from Verdi's Otello - begins. I couldn't help but immediately think of one of Callas' most celebrated roles, Violetta, in Franco Zeffirelli's production for her of La Traviata. Both open with the heroine's death, then shifts between from past to present, as though in flashbacks. In Maria, it often happens without warning.  It felt - to me - a very Callas-like thing for Larrain to do, but I've not heard anyone else mention this, so perhaps I'm looking too deeply.  That's how I think. Sue me.  

Admittedly, being obsessed with this artist since boyhood, and having seen every bio documentary, read the conservatory programs from her Athens' girlhood, own the entire Juilliard masterclass collection, and more, I was both excited - and anxious for the arrival of Larrain's movie. It did not disappoint. 

Many critics are calling it a slog . . . tedious . . . endless, yet, apart from a single scene which I might have shaved a minute from, I found its pacing perfect . . . all of a piece.  Yes, it moves slowly, gently . . . almost dreamlike at times, but never a slot but rather always with determined purpose and, as it progressed, much like that Zeffirelli Traviata, I felt Maria to be a sort of ghost story, the title character's death bookending her tragedy. 

For the literal minded, I can see this movie as being wildly problematic. There is a 1970's foreign film/art house quality which puts us at a distance.  We become observers, rather than participants.  It feels somehow un-American, a dangerous thing to say these days! All of this is helped along by Steven Knight who adds to an already remarkable catalog of scripts.  Knight provides cues and clues that serve like a metaphysical roadmap as to which direction Larrain should take the story, moving it - and us - through a haze of events both real and illusory.  Near the beginning La Callas commands: Come with me said the diva, and there was really no need to ask,''where?"  Some will perceive this as a sort of haughtiness, but I believe it's actually more of an instruction - a key for us to let go of reason. This is reinforced later when Maria explains, point blank, In opera, there IS no reason.  So . .. that's going to be a big problem for a lot of audiences, but that's actually okay because this is not a movie for them (or you, if you're reading this and feel the same).  

Larrain lavishes everything he has to make his film look and feel both beautiful and liberating, yet also almost uncomfortably stifling and distant. He uses lightness and dark like colors, right down to his shifts between black and white, faded/muted hues, and a dreamlike autumnal wash colliding simultaneously between the outside world of reality, and Maria's drug fueled hallucinatory realm. Through all of this, Larrain and his team provide, unwaveringly, stunning details, from knick knacks on shelves, to housemaid Bruna's flipping of an omelet, or Callas' hiding of pills in pockets, all the way down to her beloved poodles dancing on their hind legs impatiently awaiting their supper.

And then there's Paris.  Looking like Maria's personal dreamscape, with its boulevards and Trocadero Square filled with orchestras and choruses, these fantasy sequences culminate in one of the film's most emotionally beautiful moments. During a rainstorm we see and hear, along with Maria, the Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly as a kimono-clad Maria joins them in a shower of tears and rain. It took my breath away.  

Cinematographer, Ed Lachman's work here is about as beautiful as it gets, and reflective of his achievements. Seamlessly, he blends 35, 16, and 8 mm film stock - both color and black and white - to serve up Larrain's and Knight's vision. They are like the Holy Trinity on this project.  

None of this comes alive, however, without actors and here, Larrain's insistence and vision of Angelina Jolie pays off handsomely. Criticism of Jolie's portrayal had me worried going in, but all that was laid to rest - almost immediately.  It didn't bother me that Jolie is not a Callas clone - in fact, I'm glad they didn't go the fake nose or padded stockings angle to create a Madame Tussauds figure, but rather get beneath the skin of this Maria.  And by this Maria, I don't mean the actual Callas because - well, that's pretty much impossible, isn't it?  That said, while Jolie - especially when viewed head on - may not strongly resemble the real Maria, there are moments when the tilt of the head, or a glimpse reflected in a mirror, feel as though the ghost of Maria is present. Crazy? Absolutely. But, that's also the beauty and the magic of cinema; anything and everything is possible.  

There were a thousand versions of Maria in real life and now, dead for half a century, we have even more; more stories, more versions of them, more . . . everything. That girl from New York, Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoúlos, turned into Maria Callas, and that Maria Callas has, in death, moved into another realm entirely: the mythological. 

Ms. Jolie's Maria is a magnificent creature. Proud, vain, broken, needy, and haunted.  The actor straddles both worlds - real and imagined - with a purposefully increasing difficulty before ultimately not seeming to care which one she's in. It is an almost soul searing thing watching someone giving up. Jolie reflects this in her gestures, her hands, her sad, beautiful face, and we hear it in her words.  At one point she tells someone, someone very important to her, I don't even know if you're real.  Suddenly, neither do we. From the film's earliest moments I sensed in Jolie a kinship and admiration for the woman she's portraying.  She believes in her, speaks like her, and ultimately moves through each scene like the ghost that this Maria is.

Supporting roles, too, are beautifully done, with Kodi Smit-McPhee  as Mandrax, the mysterious documentarian, Haluk Bilginer's oily, near grotesque Onassis, and Stephen Ashfield's supportive, if mildly pushy Jeffrey Tate. Pride of place however, goes to Pierfrancesco Favino's Ferruccio and Alba Rohrwacher's Bruna, Maria's butler and housemaid. Along with Maria, this trio have formed a comfortable, small misfit family.  The love between them can be sensed - even when Maria's seeming annoyance with them is on display. Those moments are beautiful, and provide the movie's (I almost said opera's) warmest and most amusing scenes.  

Since we are dealing strictly with the final week of Maria's life, much of the story is revealed through flashbacks of Maria's youth in Athens, her triumphs at La Scala, the re-imagined (and historically inaccurate) beginning of her affair with Onassis, and a private meeting with JFK. The musical excerpts are fairly glorious . . . until they progressively become sadder and more painful, on the ears yes, but even more so in the heart. 

I've always obsessed with the artistry of Callas, and hungry for everything I can find about her, on her . . . all of it.  But, I also firmly believe that, like all historical figures, their life stories cannot adequately be told in a so-called biopic. If we truly want to know them - at least as best as we are able, it is through documentaries, biographies, research, those who ay have known them, and yet, even those give only incomplete portraits.  But a film, a biopic is always going to be filtered through the lens of the artist making it - which then reflects only his or her  truth.  It is through taking the time to listen and explore the actual work of the artist we get to know what's most important about them. This is not to say that is all they were, for everything they went through personally and professionally is what delivered them to us in the first place. But we can't ever really know that.  Not really.     

So, with its imagined narrative Larrain's Maria does not even qualify as a biopic in any sense. It is more of a tone-poem for the senses where instead of facts or history, we enter a version - a vision, or a reverie if you will, based on the imagined final days of a legend . . . of this mythological Maria everyone thinks they know, but none of us do. Or can.  

Many lines remain with me, but none felt more true than Maria's admission  to Mandrake, I am afraid audiences expect miracles, and I no longer can perform miracles.  

If you can succumb to Mr. Larrain's style . . . the gift he and his formidable company of artists have created, and wrapped so beautifully for us, you may be moved just as much as I was. Am.