Maria, the Movie—An Opera Director’s Skewering Review

A critical take (putting it mildly) on the Pablo Larrain biopic starring Angelina Jolie as the 20th century’s greatest opera diva

By Ian Strasfogel

 

Angelina Jolie in Maria

February 3, 2025

I’ve admired many films by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain, especially NO!, a lively account from 2012 of the advertising campaign that led to the end of Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile. His most recent effort, Maria, alas, has none of that earlier film’s wit and energy; it lumbers along like a funeral cortege. A fantasy loosely based on the grim final months of Maria Callas, the greatest operatic soprano of the 20th century, the work focuses relentlessly on the diva as she struggles to make a comeback while smooching her pet poodles and mistreating the staff in her airless Parisian apartment.

Angelina Jolie looks and speaks eerily like the great singer—so far so good—but her portrait is all icy exterior; it lacks the vital spark. Her Callas glowers and grumbles while ignoring her devoted servants, performed with refreshing naturalness by Pier Francesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, as they try to save her from her own worst impulses.

Full disclosure: I’m an ardent Callas fan who had the great privilege of seeing her perform Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975, an occasion I recently described for this website. (See I’ll Never Forget … Maria Callas as Tosca) In addition, I knew many of her closest friends, who told me countless stories about her complex personality—her generosity and pettiness, her love of hard work and impatience with lazy colleagues, her dislike of Mozart (!) and adoration of the 19th-century bel canto repertoire, which she resuscitated during her all too brief reign as the queen of Italian opera.

Based on my extensive knowledge of the actual woman, not the fantasy figure concocted by Mr. Larrain and his screenwriter, Nicanor Loreti, I take special exception to the film’s gratuitous swipe at the late Jeffrey Tate, the superb British musician who, along with the French singing teacher–harpsichordist Janine Reiss, worked tirelessly to help Madame Callas find a way out of her vocal quagmire. The film’s fictional stand-in for Maestro Tate addresses the diva with icy disdain. Sorry, Mr. Larrain; Maestro Tate had the greatest respect for Madame Callas and unfailingly treated her honorably. Fantasy or not, your film goes too far.

All this gratuitous cruelty, all this victimization of the diminished, struggling diva, is deployed to emphasize the film’s main theme—a stupid, erroneous one—that great art invariably arises from torment and suffering, not hard work, not exceptional talent obsessively trained and cultivated. As in Tár, Todd Field’s recent and also misguided conductor portrait, a gifted woman seemingly must destroy herself in order to deliver a memorable performance.

Nonsense. Maria Callas sang recklessly, perhaps overzealously, throughout her remarkable career, but she thrived on it. She embraced its triumphs and debacles. Most importantly, she worked her ass off. Dino Yannopoulos, a director at the Met during the 1950s, told me that when Callas rehearsed an opera he had staged for her ten years earlier in Athens, her score had a meticulous notation of every single move he had given her then, alongside exact descriptions of her later traversals of that same role with other directors. That adds up to hard work and intense concentration without a trace of heartbreak or suffering.

If anyone would like to know what Maria Callas, the complex, difficult woman, the thrilling, incomparable artist, actually was like, they should watch Maria by Callas, Tom Volf’s excellent 2017 documentary, currently streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. His film gives us a complex, credible human being, not the cadaver Mr. Larrain and Madame Jolie present.

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

Other articles by Ian Strasfogel:

Hero Worship, Up Close … Of Italo Calvino

To Restore or Not to Restore a Rare Einstein Photo—It’s All Relativity

Einstein, Cast Aside and Tossed in a Closet

Edible Memories: Lunch at Lüchow’s with Lauritz Melchior

I’ll Never Forget … Maria Callas as Tosca, 1965

Breaking New Ground at the Met Opera

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