“Maria,” the third in Pablo Larraín’s biopic trilogy after “Jackie” and “Spencer,” stars Angelina Jolie as Greek-American soprano Maria Callas, drifting in the last week of her life on a diet of downers and a stream of self-absorption. Callas died of a heart attack in 1977, three years out from her last singing appearance, though the film sees Jolie as Callas rehearsing for an imagined performance that will never come due to the state of her voice — and for a camera crew, dreamed up in a fog of pills, led by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
“Maria” frames Callas as a survivor through childhood and failed relationships and into her last days, though in the film’s present, she’s frightfully thin (“A lot of me is being taken away,” Callas tells her sister at one point) and eliciting worries from her Paris house staff (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher). Both abet and confront her dependency on methaqualone and other pills and make for an upstairs-downstairs dynamic in the screenplay.
Alongside Larraín and her co-stars, Jolie held court during a Venice Film Festival press conference Thursday afternoon, shortly after the movie’s first press and industry screening. Asked about whether she hopes “Maria” puts her back in the Oscar race, Jolie said, “For me, the bar in this where I would know if I did good enough are the Maria Callas fans and those who love opera, and my fear would be to disappoint them, so of course all other things and in my own business if there’s a response to the work, I’m very grateful, but in my heart to disappoint the people who love her and who she means a lot to, and her legacy, I came to care for her. I didn’t want to do a disservice to this woman.”
With “Spencer” screenwriter Steven Knight shifting timelines and cinematographer Ed Lachman ebbing between time periods in black and white and color, Callas looks back on her early life and more recent past, including her relationship with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who left her for Jacqueline Kennedy. Jolie spent more than half a year studying opera and training her voice, and the film uses a multilayered track to meld the actual voice of Callas in her prime with Jolie’s more novice soprano, but if there are seams here, you can’t feel them. At times, Jolie was singing out loud by herself in front of up to 500 extras during flashbacks to a younger, less deteriorated Callas. Jolie, when asked for her favorite opera or karaoke song, said, “I’d never sung before, so I’ve never done karaoke.”
“Everybody here knows, I was terribly nervous,” Jolie said, pointing to the cast and crew. “I spent almost seven months training because when you work with Pablo, you can’t do anything by half, he demands in the most wonderful way that you really do the work and learn and train, but my first time singing? I remember being so nervous, my sons were there, they had to lock the door to make sure no one else was coming in. I was shaky. Pablo started me in a small room and ended me in La Scala. I was frightened.
Asked about her own music taste, Jolie said, “I was more punk. I loved all music but I probably listened to The Clash more than most, and as I’ve gotten older, classical music, opera, I think there’s something I still love the same music I did when I was younger, I’ll still listen to The Clash, when you’ve felt a certain level of despair, of pain, of love, at a certain point there are only certain sounds that can match that feeling, and to me the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of opera, there’s nothing like it, and that feeling that would move all of us if we were to hear it, would be the only sound if we were to explain that pain.”
“Most of the stories that she sung,” Larraín said, “were tragedies, and 90 percent of the operas she sung end in death on the stage. How do we make a movie where the main character slowly becomes the sum of the tragedies that she sung? And the angle was a celebration. I didn’t want to make a dark movie about a tragic situation. It’s more like a movie where a woman that has spent her life singing for others, taking care of others, worrying about her relationships, now she’s ready to take care of herself and find her own destiny.”
Throughout the press conference, Jolie fielded questions danced around how her own widely publicized personal life influenced her performance as a woman who was stalked by fans and paparazzi throughout her career. “There’s a lot I won’t say in this room that you probably know and assume,” Jolie said. When asked how much she related to Callas, who here is lonely and raked-over by critics, Jolie said she shared in Callas’ “vulnerability,” but little more to that effect. (Later in the fest, Brad Pitt, with whom she’s in the midst of a litigious, drawn-out divorce, will appear on the Lido with his film “Wolfs.”)
Jolie added, “Once I passed the music, it was getting past the Maria we all think we know, and I sat with her glasses on, and her Greek hair, and her robe, and thought of her alone in her kitchen … and who that person was and allowed that human to come forward, and her loneliness, and I think it’s also quite sad. I wish she were here today to see this kindness to her life because when she passed, the last experience she had, she went out and she tried, and the critics were so cruel to her, and she wasn’t not trying. She was older, and she wasn’t as good, and they were mean. I don’t know if she passed knowing she was appreciated and did her best. I think she may have died with a lot of loneliness and pain.”
News broke on Venice opening day, August 28, that Netflix acquired the film. “Maria,” which is in competition for the Golden Lion, went into the festival as one of the hottest sales titles. Next, Jolie will head to the U.S. for the fall festivals, including TIFF to debut her directing effort “Without Blood,” and she’s expected in Telluride for “Maria” also.
“I’ve needed to be home more with my family in these last years, and in that time, I’ve become more grateful to just be an artist, and play, and be among all you in this creative world that we are all fortunate to be part of. I am grateful to be an artist in any way,” Jolie said.
