Maria review: Angelina Jolie reminds us what an accomplished actress she can be

The Chilean director has brought us off-kilter films about Jackie Kennedy (2016’s Jackie) and Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer), not to mention several films in his native Spanish tackling the Pinochet regime.

Here, Maria brings us a look at the world’s greatest opera singer, Maria Callas. A woman who moved in rarefied circles – she was once married to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis – she also moved audiences to tears with her recitals.

Scripted by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, who also penned Spencer, the film looks at Callas in the last week of her life. It begins on 16th September, 1977, the day she died of a heart attack, as doctors and her housemaid, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) gather solemnly around the body. Rewinding just seven days, Knight’s script gives us a part-imagined expression of this curtain call.

In this time, as she utters "I am seeking something I lost," she visits a pianist in the hope she can recapture the highs of her now-failing voice. But this is a woman who is reliant on prescription medications.

In one subtle moment, we see her placing fistfuls of pills in the pockets of her outfits, presumably to pep her up when she’s in public. A TV crew is also set to visit her, but when the journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) introduces himself as ‘Mandrax’, it becomes clear this is a device to allow us to see into her past.

Certainly, Callas conversing with the drug that now props her up daily is a wry conceit, but it never feels glib. She’s now a woman who only has the past to look back on. "There is no life away from the stage,' she says. "The stage is in my mind." And Larraín beautifully switches between Callas in an empty venue to performing in front of thousands of well-wishers in some of her finest moments. In the present, she can’t even stand to hear her own records.

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Switching between colour and black-and-white, the film shows Callas in her glory years, mixing with the likes of Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and President John F Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson, who also played JFK in Jackie). Romanced by Onassis, despite married at the time, this independent spirit knows her own mind: “To be a possession in a cabinet is not my ambition,” she says, but even she knows she will eventually be supplanted by Jackie Kennedy after the President’s murder.

As emotionally sterile as the film can be – it’s not a work that will exactly move you to tears – it can be very tender, notably the scene where she plays cards with Bruna and Ferruccio, and wishes both will stay together when she’s gone. Particularly good is Favino, the Italian actor who starred in 2023’s Venice Film Festival opener Comandante, as the manservant with a bad back (he has a spine "like a twig", the doctors tell him) who spends most of the film shifting Callas's grand piano around her luxurious, airless apartment.

But of course, Jolie must be the one that takes the biggest bow. It’s a performance that reminds us of what an accomplished actress she can be.

Maria is coming to cinemas soon.

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