"Maria" 4K Review

 I grew up listening to opera because my mom was a huge opera buff. The King and Queen of her fandom were tenor Franco Corelli and mega-diva prima donna soprano Maria Callas, who final days are the subject of Maria, a Netflix Original biopic starring Angelina Jolie, making an unsuccessful run for Oscar appreciation for the first time in ages. 

Opening on Sept. 16, 1977 with authorities arriving in her Paris apartment to take her body away (she was only 53), the film then goes back a week to show Callas's life in her opulent home, accompanied by her two dogs and her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), the former whom she is constantly requesting he move the grand piano around.

She hasn't performed for several years and has been abusing prescription drugs including Mandrax, a sedative which can cause hallucinations like the young filmmaker, also named Mandrax (get it?) played by Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Name of the Dog), who has arrived to interview her and follows her around town. She also imagines she is encountering scenarios where a crowd flash mobs the Anvil Chorus from Carmen or an orchestra & choir in front of a church in the rain are doing Madame Butterfly.

There are also flashbacks to her prime years and her ill-starred love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whom she met in 1957 and eventually left her husband for only to have Ari end up marrying the widow Jackie Kennedy, thus becoming Jackie O. These black & white flashbacks include a news-to-me scene where her mother appeared to be pimping her daughters out to German and Italian officer during WWII and the officer who chooses Maria tells her to not bother disrobing, but just sing for him.

Callas is also meeting with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) to test her voice for a potential comeback, but it's clear that ship has sailed and sunk and that only fuels her despair more.

On paper, Maria should've been a sure fire Oscar bait film. Chilean director Pablo Larraín's past films have included 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer which earned stars Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart Best Actress nominations for portraying Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, respectively. Jolie has been mostly absent from acting beyond voice work in the Kung Fu Panda series and the two Maleficent live-action Disney joints for almost 15 years. Her last big movies - 2021's Taylor Sheridan misfire Those Who Wish Me Dead and Marvel misfire Eternals did poorly in the post-Hot Fad Plague world - and her last Oscar nomination was 2008's Changeling. Her last Oscar and Golden Globe wins were literally a quarter-century ago; she's due for a comeback.

Sadly, it didn't happen partially because the Academy chose to throw away a Best Actress nomination on a man who is currently as of this writing being disavowed by Hollyweird because he made politically incorrect tweets some years back, but mostly because despite some critical kudos, it sank without a trace on the endless shelves of Netflix content mostly due to it being quite slow and dull. (The missus fell asleep and I struggled myself.)

Choosing to focus on the final days of her life makes the experience into just waiting for her to die. We don't know really understand why she was reduced to a reclusive life with her dogs and staff. The flashbacks to her relationship with Onassis don't really sell this supposedly deep love between a self-described short, ugly man who doesn't like opera and the diva.

That said, I liked the fantastical Impressionistic hallucination-fueled musical vignettes and appreciated Jolie's ghostly performance of a woman who stop living years before, yet never quite let go of the life she led. Bucking the trend of most awards-bait imitation performances, she eschews the use of prosthetics to transform her familiar visage into Callas' more honker-forward look. She chooses to act Callas, not cosplay Callas. I thought it was a subtle performance with flashes of vibrancy with minimal scene chewing, but the missus disagreed, for what it's worth.

 Ultimately, the only Oscar nomination Maria received was for Edward Lachman's period-evoking cinematography. Current day scenes have a muted color palate while flashbacks are in lustrous B&W. It's not much in the way of a Dolby Vision showcase, but the Atmos audio is clear and enveloping.

My mom had a stroke in 2007 and passed away in 2018 and thus missed this biopic of her favorite soprano as well as 2016's Florence Foster Jenkins which starred Meryl Steep as the literal antithesis of quality opera singing. I wonder what she would've thought of them both?

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.