Maria! I’ve just seen a film called Maria! Say it once and there’s music playing. Say it twice and it sounds like … Oscar?
Since the moment it was announced in the Venice lineup, Pablo Larraín’s Maria has been pegged by Oscar-watchers as a title to watch out for: a film about opera legend Maria Callas … set in the final weeks of her life … starring Angelina Jolie … who’s making her grand return to screen after years away from the spotlight. Singing, stars, drugs, death, comebacks — if this film checked any more boxes, it’d be a tax form.
After 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, Maria marks the conclusion of an unofficial trilogy by the Chilean Larraín: three biopics exploring the messy inner lives of iconic women at a moment of crisis. Those earlier films each earned Best Actress nominations for their stars, Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, and on paper, Maria seemed likely to continue that trend. However, two potential issues loomed. The first was that the film did not have U.S. distribution. The second was that Larraín’s particular vision has often skewed too arthouse for Academy voters in the past: Tellingly, both Portman and Stewart came into their seasons pegged as potential powerhouses, only for their films to lose steam over the course of the fall.
The first issue was addressed the night before Maria’s Venice premiere, when Netflix announced it had acquired the film, which should signify a robust campaign for Jolie. As for the second, Thursday brought the first Venice screenings of Maria, which means pundits now get to make up their own minds about how strong a contender Jolie might be. My verdict? With the obvious caveat that we’re only one or two steps into the awards-season marathon, I think we can expect her to be a formidable contender.
The first reason for optimism is that Maria turns out to be far less alienating than the high camp of Jackie or the jazz freak-outs of Spencer. As Larraín explained at the film’s official press conference, the film itself is structured as an opera: “The main character slowly becomes the sum of the troubles she sang about.” This makes Maria a statelier, quieter film than its predecessors. (Too stately for critics like my colleague Alison Willmore, though that has rarely been a problem for Oscar voters.) Winky meta touches abound, like an imaginary TV crew that follows Callas around to highlight when she’s about to spill an “important truth.” But here, such departures from reality come off as all-too-fitting flights of fancy. As Jolie’s Callas reminds us, “My life is an opera. There is no reason in opera.”
Both Jackie and Spencer followed women struggling with the question of their individual identity after being severed from their husbands. Maria certainly has elements of this in its depiction of the singer’s tortuous relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who eventually left her for Jackie Kennedy. (Though she’s never shown, there are so many mentions of the former First Lady that I half-expected Portman to show up in a mid-credits scene teasing the Onassis Initiative.) But the greater struggle for identity in the film is Callas’s difficulty determining who she is outside the shadow of her own legend: “La Callas,” the greatest vocal talent in opera history. Three years after giving up public performances, Maria wants to find out if she still has a voice.
That’s as awards-friendly a tagline as you’re likely to find on the Lido this year, and it’s matched by an effortful Oscar narrative: To inhabit that voice, Jolie prepared for nearly seven months. “I was terribly nervous” about singing, she said at the film’s Venice press conference, which was essentially the first test run of her campaign’s official talking points. “My first time, my sons were there; they had to lock the door to make sure no one else was coming in.” As part of her training, Jolie worked with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who taught Austin Butler how to sing for Elvis and Timothée Chalamet how to sing like Bob Dylan. Vetro told me he assembled a small team to get the star as close to Maria Callas as possible: two female opera teachers to help her with the arias, plus a male coach to teach her how to sing in Italian. “When you work with Pablo, you can’t do anything by half,” Jolie told the Venice press.
Still, if it was easy to sound like Maria Callas, she wouldn’t have been Maria Callas. How well does Jolie pull it off? According to the film’s press notes, the voice heard in Maria is a mix of Jolie’s voice and archival Callas recordings, a strategy previously employed by films like Bohemian Rhapsody. Jolie is also aided by the fact that she’s playing Callas at a moment when she was far from the peak of her powers. “That’s Maria singing,” a kindly instructor says after hearing her first faltering notes. “I want to hear La Callas.”
However little Jolie there may be in the vocals, the performance is all Angelina. Shot in extreme close-up, with eyes fluttering and mouth trembling, she gives the sense that Callas’s legendary voice could only emerge from a deep well of hurt. (In flashback, her mother forces young Maria to sing for S.S. officers during the Nazi occupation of Greece — an early sign of the corrosive effects of selling your talent.) “You have no idea of the pain it takes to pull music from your belly out of your mouth,” she cracks to one unsatisfied fan. Later, she tells a concerned doctor, “Happiness has never produced a beautiful melody.”
In this Callas we see, too, an imperious quality that matches the actress’s own star persona. At the Venice press conference, reporters repeatedly attempted to get Jolie to speak about the similarities between herself and her character, an opportunity she mostly declined. “There’s a lot I won’t say in this room that you probably know, or assume,” she said — perhaps a reference to tabloid coverage, or her divorce from Brad Pitt, or both. But when asked her feelings about the word “diva,” she cracked the door slightly. “It’s often come with a lot of negative connotations,” Jolie said. “It is often other people’s perceptions of a woman that defines who she is.”
Her director chimed in: “A diva would never exist if there was not excellence in what she does.” Expect to hear variations on that line in the coming months as Jolie seeks her second competitive Oscar and first in the lead-actress category. (She previously won in supporting for Girl, Interrupted, and earned an honorary trophy in 2014 for her humanitarian work.) After Venice, she’ll fly to Toronto to be honored with a TIFF Tribute Award next week, an honor that recently foreshadowed Oscar gold for Michelle Yeoh, Brendan Fraser, and Jessica Chastain. And with Netflix now footing the bill, we may see a level of Angelina ubiquity unseen since her glory days in the late Aughts.
“Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am,” Callas tells her butler at one point in the film. “I’m in the mood for adulation.” This fall, Jolie had better be as well.
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