As 'Maria,' Angelina Jolie gives an off-key performance

Pablo Larraín isn't a homosexual?!?!?!

I was going to begin this by writing, “Like many gay men, Pablo Larraín loves a tragic, miserable woman.” Larraín is best known for a trilogy of films about iconic and iconically sad women: “Jackie,” where Natalie Portman plays a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy; “Spencer,” starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana at the end of her rope, and her marriage; and now Angelina Jolie as opera diva Maria Callas during her last days in “Maria.” These movies are catnip for certain homosexual men – Natalie Portman having a freakout in Jackie Kennedy’s famous pink, blood-spattered suit; Princess Diana eating her pearls in a soup; a movie about an opera singer – come on. Just watching them is arguably faggot behavior. But apparently Larraín was married to a woman and has two children. So much for that intro. Still, pretty gay to be so obsessed with women. Honestly.

Anyway…

Of the three tragiwomen Larraín has made movies about, Callas is the one with whom I am least familiar. (I apologize in advance to the one person subscribed to this newsletter who I know is a passionate and erudite opera aficionado.) I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to opera. I enjoy listening, but I don’t often seek it out. I’ve been dazzled the few times I’ve been to the Met. But I don’t really know much about the art form or its history. (Other than Callas, the only other singers I can name off the top of my head are Anthony Roth Costanzo, Renee Flemming, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Marian Anderson – and that’s it. I’m a little better with composers. This has nothing to do with anything other than to say that I have a wide but shallow breadth of knowledge that makes me really great at trivia.)

Going into “Maria,” I knew Callas was an opera singer, if not the opera singer. I would imagine that most people on the planet have heard her singing “Carmen” or “O mio babbino caro” in at least a commercial or something. But I probably couldn’t identify her in a photograph before tonight. I certainly couldn’t have told you anything about her life.

These are actually ideal conditions to go into a biopic. I wasn’t looking for Jolie to do a seamless Callas impression, because I don’t know what that would look like. Jolie could interpret the character in any way without my conception of the real Callas distracting me from the inevitable differences.

Unfortunately, Angelina Jolie is more a movie star than a character actor. Most of the movies she’s famous for are action-packed mega-blockbusters that depend more on her supreme good looks and her physicality than her skill as an actor. When she’s at her best dramatically, like in “Girl, Interrupted,” she’s channeling her long obsessed over public persona into characters who seem not so different from the woman we imagine the private Angelina to be. The night Jolie won an Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted,” where she played a free spirit psychopath sexpot, she infamously made out with her brother on the red carpet.

The public Jolie of 25 years later is a more subdued figure – a quiet activist with a brood of multiracial children who has been enmeshed in nine years of divorce litigation with Brad Pitt, an abusive, drunk father and husband. (But I love Brad Pitt, so I’ll separate the art from the artist there. Sorry!) For a generational beauty who is rich and famous beyond imagination, there is a melancholy that permeates Jolie’s aura these days.

If she’s at her best when she’s essentially playing herself, you might imagine Jolie as an aging diva who has been mercilessly picked over by the public and hurt by men would be among her strongest roles. But something is lost in translation. As Callas, her performance is deeply mannered. She models wigs and gowns while her accent shifts from Mid-Atlantic to sort of British to that pseudo European accent Johnny Depp and Lindsay Lohan use sometimes. She never blends into the role or makes it her own. You’re acutely aware you’re watching Angelina Jolie in period drag at all times.

Jolie is pretty funny when Maria’s being a total bitch to her butler, Ferruccio (​​Pierfrancesco Favino). Ferruccio is a Sisyphusian figure, moving a piano back and forth at Maria’s petty whims and trying in vain to stop her from hoovering up all the pills in the house. At one point, Maria tells Ferruccio to book her a hairdresser “who won’t talk to me.” In the next breath, she tells him to make a reservation at a restaurant where she won’t eat but she’ll be recognized and adored. She does stuff like feed prosciutto to her dogs. The woman defined the word diva, at least as Larraín tells it. (You can imagine the faggots rolling in the aisles screaming, “yaaaassss khia” and the screen.) But “Maria” is not a comedy, and Jolie’s performance doesn’t work much beyond the laugh lines.

When “Maria” begins in September of 1977, Callas is already a dead body on the floor of her Paris flat. Larraín (working from a script by Steven Knight, who also wrote “Spencer”) takes us back to the last week of her life. Maria has been living among the French, but the frog is in her throat. She’s lost her voice and last performed in public years ago. She leads an isolated life in an apartment that’s more like a museum than a home. Her only companions are Ferruccio and her exasperated maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher in a terrible wig), whom she describes as her children, her sibling, her parents, and her friends. They’re also her acolytes, her sycophants, and her enablers. A pesky doctor comes around to warn her about the small pharmacy’s worth of medication she takes daily, namely something called Mandrax, which you might know better as quaaludes.

It’s not clear if it’s the medication that’s making Maria delusional or if portraying her as a crazy woman just makes her life more operatically tragic. She slips between reality and hallucination; her past and her present. Mandrax is personified as a reporter, not dissimilar to the Billy Crudup character in “Jackie,” played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Maria tells Ferruccio and Bruna a television crew is coming to interview her and they watch as she talks to an empty room about her life. This should feel sad, but it doesn’t feel like anything at all. That can be said of the entire movie.

Reading about Callas’s life on Wikipedia after the movie (about as much research as I intend to do), I learned that poor posture, too many demanding roles, and a dramatic weight loss are thought to have contributed to her vocal decline. (A fat Greek teen who looks so little like Jolie that it’s confusing at first plays the young Maria.) The culprit in the movie is the very 2024 problem of trauma. Young, fat Maria gets whored out to Nazis by her mother. As an adult, she falls in love with the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who calls himself “old and ugly” but seems to be a big improvement on the roly poly octogenarian she’s already married to – except that Aristotle won’t marry her. Or maybe she won’t marry him. An abortion is mentioned. It’s never really clear other than it’s an unfulfilled love for both of them. Maria visits Aristotle’s death bed but has to leave before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – the woman he did marry – comes in. Spoiler alert. If you’re hoping Natalie Portman has a cameo, prepare to be disappointed. The Larraín Tragiwoman Cinematic Universe isn’t interconnected.

The one place where this movie doesn’t disappoint though is in the stunning images of operatic performances Larraín and cinematographer Edward Lachman craft as Maria’s hallucinations. As Maria and Mandrax make their way through Paris, they wander in and out of gorgeous spectacles on the stage of her life. I got goosebumps when Maria encounters a choir of men singing Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” in front of the Eiffel Tower, before they evaporate into thin air. It’s a testament to the power of opera. It also lays bare what “Maria” is sorely lacking – emotion.

“Maria” is now playing in select theaters and premiers on December 11 on Netflix.