Writer-director Pablo Larraín has made a specialty and cottage industry creating biopics about mythic women on the verge and/or in crisis. The Chilean-born auteur has thus far chronicled the politically spun lives in Spencer (Lady Di) and in Jackie (O), and now shifts over into high culture land with the impressive if flawed Maria (Callas).
In a sense, the collision of fates and dramatic dimensions for all three could be the stuff of opera, although Maria (with a stunning performance from Angelina Jolie as the protagonist) is the most definitively “operatic” of the trio. In those terms, Maria can be best described as a tragedy as conveyed in the last chapter — or third act — of Callas’s life, with legendary career highlights folded into the narrative.
As with last year's overly ballyhooed Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, Maria tells its character’s life story from the perspective and backward-glancing prism of the artist's final phase. The prominent milieu in Steven Knight's script deals with Callas facing the faded glory of her voice, the haunting specter of her former legendary status, and the ghostly memory of a cruel mother who forced her to sing and make other compromising positions for Nazi officers back in Athens. There is also the matter of a mercurial but deep relationship with Aristotle Onassis.