Maria

Movie title: Maria (dir. Pablo Larraín)
Movie description: The final in Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s ‘20th Century Women’ trilogy seems destined to be underrated when placed alongside the buzzed-about histrionics of Jackie and the ghostliness of Spencer. Remarkably, it is actually the best of the three, a mournful and fascinating swing for the fences grounded by a moving comeback performance from Angelina Jolie.
Date published: January 31, 2025
Country: United States - Italy - Germany
Author: Steven Knight
Director(s): Pablo Larraín
Actor(s): Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher
Genre: Biography, Drama, Music, Tragedy, Period Drama
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Movie Rating
This week, four strong, women-led or dominated films arrive in New Zealand cinemas. The most buzzed about is Babygirl, the Nicole Kidman BDSM romp that is defined by the strength of its lead performance, even if the rest of the film fails to meet her tempo. Katie Wolfe’s The Haka Party Incident, one of the best films to come out of Aotearoa in 2024/25, is a striking documentary about a nearly-forgotten period of local history. Companion features a star-making performance from Yellowjackets and Heretic breakout Sophie Thatcher in a satisfying, sci-fi tinged thriller that rewards going in blind. All have something going for them, but of the four I decided to focus on Maria, the final chapter in Pablo Larraín’s series of films on iconic 20th Century women that began with Jackie and Spencer, because it’s a film that already seems in danger of fading into the background too soon, just a few months on from predictions that it may earn a second Oscar for Angelina Jolie (predictions that did not come to pass). Larraín’s films are an acquired taste, it’s fair to say, and yet his three biopics – for all their flaws – stand out in today’s landscape for their severe and concentrated fealty to an artistic vision. No mere Wikipedia recounts are the films of this trilogy.
Maria is about the opera singer Maria Callas, a performer I confess to not knowing much about (I can’t say I was much of an attendee of operas in my younger years, preferring the more working class environs of the cinema), which naturally colours one’s perception of the biopic in question. The issue of ‘ownership’ in the telling of the story of a real-life figure makes the biopic as a form of storytelling maximally fraught. What we think we know of the subject, how willing we are to permit the transferral of a real-life persona into the sphere of artistic interpretation is always a slippery, hard-to-define thing. We know when it’s done right, and we know when it’s, well, Bohemian Rhapsody. In a sense, it makes watching a film like Maria more palatable, as the uninitiated can more easily permit their subconscious reading of the character to be filled by the version shown on screen. It’s why I bristle at the idea of a Bruce Springsteen movie, which threatens to be unleashed sometime later this year. Larraín makes the calls that one would hope with a story such as this, including narrowing in to focus on one particular chapter of the artist’s life, rather than try to squeeze the entirety of an icon’s days into a two-hour timeframe. Larraín also demonstrates his willingness to take artistic license, inventing a hallucinatory interviewer named ‘Mandrax’ (The Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), which also happens to be the name of the medication she overuses, to interrogate Callas’ thoughts and feelings as she shuffles off this mortal coil. It is by this structure that Larraín is able to flit easily between major moments of Callas’ life, letting them inform the picture of the damaged, prideful figure Jolie’s performance conjures.
The final in Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s ‘20th Century Women’ trilogy seems destined to be underrated when placed alongside the buzzed-about histrionics of Jackie and the ghostliness of Spencer. Remarkably, it is actually the best of the three, a mournful and fascinating swing for the fences grounded by a moving comeback performance from Angelina Jolie.
To be a Jolie fan is to hope for a role that meets her untapped talent, an ability that has only occasionally been given genuine exposure in films like Girl, Interrupted, the conflicted Changeling and A Mighty Heart (as well as her own film, the misunderstood By the Sea). Jolie has been typecast as the pouting sexpot, a Johanssen-esque action savant, an imperious villainess, and she’s risen to the occasion; but with a film like Maria we get closer to what a new era of Jolie performance might look like. The actress has been through a lot (the hovering spectre of her court case with her ex-husband and its ensuing fallout informs the way we watch here, with its story of Callas attempting to relocate her voice and the will to live once more), and her fine work in Maria offers a new shade, one more vulnerable and wounded, but not without a measure of fortitude. Jolie’s Callas is an aloof, mysterious creature – one whose at times frustrating insistence on distance and remoteness is a defense mechanism for a figure who both desires the limelight and flees from it in terror. A telling scene finds La Callas venturing out of her stronghold of an apartment to sit outside at a local restaurant, where she ‘goes to be adored’. Once there, the withering eye of a one-time fan proves too much, and she finds herself retreating once again. Callas’ voice has long-since left her, and she only expresses herself to the husband-and-wife servant team that see to her every need. These two are played by Italian character actors Pierfrancisco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, who provide warm, humanistic support to the slowly cracking glass of Jolie’s performance. A late-breaking sequence that finds Callas playing cards with the two, celebrating their love which has come to be defined by their relation to the opera star, is deeply moving in its quiet implications.
Larraín’s filmmaking, particularly within the scope of this trilogy, often takes on the ambience of a refined grandmother’s loungeroom – quiet, dusty, perfumed and reverberating with old-world regality and glamour. Boredom is a presence in these films, particularly in Maria, which is at-times painfully slow as it treads mournfully toward its foregone conclusion. Cinematographer Ed Lachmann, most-known for his Todd Haynes collaborations, constructs intricate, rapturous imagery to guide this slow boat downriver, trading in the haunting anxiety of Spencer for something akin to a wake in motion, fitting for a character pursued by the ghost of opera itself. It can make for a somewhat claustrophobic experience, one that was ultimately probably too muted and alienating for the widespread embrace that an Oscar campaign would have banked on. It is a resounding bound forward for Larraín, though, in terms of stylistic control and execution, one that doesn’t feel too much like a monument to the director’s ego – of which other Larraíns have been guilty – and resulting in a film that finds triumph in concluding with a whimper, rather than a bang.
Maria is in cinemas now.