Maria: has Angelina Jolie biopic missed the mark?

Angelina Jolie plays the title role in 'Maria', her first screen appearance since 2021

(Image credit: BFA / Alamy Stock Photo)

published 6 September 2024

We last saw Angelina Jolie on screen three years ago in the Marvel blockbuster "The Eternals", but she had been retreating from the spotlight for "a lot longer than that".

Jolie's role in "Maria" as the famed opera singer Maria Callas is her most ambitious in years. But it doesn’t feel "like a reemergence so much as it does a project that’s been constructed around the strategically withholding presence she’s become", said Alison Willmore on Vulture.

In the film, where events take place over a week, Callas has stepped out of the limelight, too. She hasn't sung on stage for more than four years and spends much of her time in her luxurious apartment, with her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) cooking her omelettes and her butler Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) monitoring her medication.

"Maria" represents the final part in Chilean director Pablo Larraín's trilogy that began with Natalie Portman as Jackie Onassis in "Jackie" and continued with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in "Spencer". And certainly Callas is a similarly troubled woman in the later stages of her life.

Her interview with a TV journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is revealed to be the consequence of a drug-induced hallucination. The interviewer's name? Mandrax, Callas’s prescription pill of choice. Whether she is insane is something of a moot point. "What is real and what is not real is my business," she says grandly, but the damage done to a woman in her last throes is clear to see.

There are scenes to behold, said Stephanie Bunbury on Deadline, with one of the most extraordinary set "under the Eiffel Tower with a horde of Parisian workers who are suddenly, inexplicably belting out Verdi’s 'Anvil Chorus' from 'Il Trovatore'".

However, despite Jolie spending six months in vocal lessons, "the close-ups of her singing feel off", said David Mouriquand on Euronews , never "quite hitting their high notes, as they distractingly look like Jolie lip-synching rather than truly embodying the celebrated musician and her unique posture".

Indeed, said Willmore, there is something "bloodless about what Jolie does onscreen, a level of remove that makes it seem like she’s playing a woman who’s playing Maria Callas".

The script, by "Peaky Blinders"' Steven Knight, has a good stock of one-liners, though ("I'm not hungry – I come to restaurants to be adored"; "I'm in the mood for adulation") and the movie looks incredible, too, with cinematographer Edward Lachman giving ’70s Paris the "exact look of a vintage postcard". But there’s "little life" in this creation; "there’s no sense of anything risked".

The "stunning" ending featuring the diva's dogs "crying an aria", allows Rohrwacher and Favino to "steal the show" with a "genuine moment of tenderness", said Mouriquand. For all its strengths, though, "Maria" is "not the sonic slap many were hoping" for, though it "does remain an engaging love letter to Callas".