In Maria, Angelina Jolie gives a career-high performance as a crumbling opera legend

While the recognition of film art by the Oscars remains a topic of discussion, if we were to talk about the overlooked gems in last week's nominations, Angelina Jolie's brilliant portrayal of the Greek-American opera legend Maria Callas would definitely be worth mentioning. This film, set during the last week of Callas's life, delves deep into the inner world of this opera icon.

Directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie, the film also features Alba Rohrwacher, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Pierfrancesco Favino, Haluk Bilginer, and Valeria Golino. Released in theaters on January 30th, it is likely to move you with Callas's indomitable spirit and Jolie's masterful performance. Jolie's acting is a career highlight, at times elegant, at times imperious, at times elusive, and at times defiant.

“You have no idea,” Callas, played by Jolie, once rebukes a fan, her eyes sharp as knives through tinted lenses. “You have no idea how much it hurts to pull the music from your gut and sing it out of your miserable mouth. You have no idea!” Her words seem to be directed at the Oscar judges as well. This film, "Maria," is another reinterpretation of a 20th-century icon by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, following "Jackie" (2016) and "Spencer" (2021), eschewing the traditional biopic format for an impressionistic approach, leaning towards a spiritual communion with its subject.

The film begins a week before Callas's death in September 1977, with the 53-year-old opera diva, dressed in her signature black attire, wandering through her Paris mansion, accompanied only by her loyal butler (Pierfrancesco Favino), her maid (Alba Rohrwacher), and the two poodles she feeds. She is dieting, taking medication, and issuing some comical, acerbic memos (“I need you to make an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t talk”). The “goddess” is lost, melancholic, and slightly reflective, suffering from dermatomyositis, a rare autoimmune disease, and has not been on stage for years.

“I can no longer create miracles,” she confesses to a conductor (Stephen Ashfield), whom she tries to visit in an attempt to revive her voice. She may also be hallucinating. Callas did not write a formal memoir, and she imagines a TV crew interviewing her for a documentary about her final days, a crew led by a filmmaker named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) — which happens to be the name of the drug she is taking. That’s right: Maria is essentially confessing her life, loves, and dreams to a prescription medication.

“Madam, is this crew real?” her butler asks. Maria's reply serves as the guiding principle of the film: “From this morning forward, what is real and what is not is my business.” As she immerses herself in reverie, the film flashes back to the past, sometimes in black and white, showing Callas’s memories of her youth: as a girl forced to perform for Nazi soldiers in occupied Greece (Agelina Papadopoulou); as a young singer emerging in Europe; and as someone elevated to international stardom by shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who regarded her as one of his many possessions.

The film smoothly transitions between the present and past memories, as if all of history—Maria's history—is unfolding in a surreal moment where private and public images become indistinguishable. “There is no life without the stage,” Maria says. “The stage is in my mind.” Brief musical excerpts capture the power, joy, and fame of Callas at her peak, while other moments—like a band appearing in the rain on a sunny Paris street—seem completely detached from time, emerging from a fever dream.

Veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman (who worked on "Carol" and "The Virgin Suicides"), and the film's sole Oscar nominee, uses rich and expressive cinematography, along with Larraín's soft, swirling camera work, to create a contradictory sense of intimacy and dissonance; we are never sure what is real and what is imagined. It’s both a glimpse into Callas’s state of mind and a clear distillation of her essence, evoking her almost supernatural relationship with music, as well as her fraught relationships with her mother, the media, and a world that wanted to divide her.

In many ways, Callas is a perfect fit for Jolie, whose radiant talent has long seemed somewhat buried in Hollywood. The actress fully embodies Maria’s contradictions, her perfect demeanor and her steely self-control, as if guiding her own fame, as well as an understanding of the exacting demands of fame, beauty, and age, and a woman’s need to write her own story at all costs. She combines her own voice with Callas's singing, capturing the singer’s gestural power, her pain, and the shadows that seemed to haunt her even at the peak of her success.

As Maria says to Mandrax: “We are Greek—death is a familiar companion.” This is a loving, sometimes chilling, gaze at an opera diva on the verge of oblivion, and a portrait as rich, melancholic, and moving as its subject.