It’s been three years since Angelina Jolie appeared in a movie, though she’s been making a retreat from stardom for a lot longer than that, pulling back pieces of herself from the public sphere as well as from the persona she projects onscreen. Gone are the days of the blood-vial-wearing wild child or the bombshell whose chemistry with co-star Brad Pitt in Mr. and Mrs. Smith made their coupling up feel inevitable. As a celebrity, she’s stripped sex from her image entirely, emphasizing instead her identity as a filmmaker, a human-rights activist, and a mother of six. As an actor, she’s voiced a tiger in the Kung Fu Panda franchise as often as she’s actually appeared onscreen over the last decade, and in the live-action films she has taken on, her roles have been increasingly defined by her character’s aloof beauty and elegant suffering. I can’t begrudge Jolie her desire to armor up and put more layers between herself and a public that’s been ingesting the intimate details of her life since she was scarcely old enough to legally drink. But I also can’t deny that I’ve found this Madonna-martyr phase in her career less than compelling. At her best, Jolie is thrilling, a talent who’s capable of bursting into the frame and making you believe she’s about to devour the world whole. In her more recent roles, even when running headlong through a raging forest fire, she feels only half there.
That tendency holds true in Maria, the new film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, in which Jolie plays legendary opera singer Maria Callas. The role is her most ambitious in ages, and yet 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. The part comes with all sorts of details that serve as the heralds of its legitimacy, like the fact that Jolie spent months in training to sing opera, her real voice blended with Callas’s famous one whenever her character performs. Despite that, there’s something bloodless about what Jolie actually does onscreen, a level of remove that makes it seem like she’s playing a woman who’s playing Maria Callas. Some aspect of that is intentional — Maria is the final part in a trilogy from Larraín that began with Natalie Portman as Jackie Onassis in Jackie and continued with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in Spencer, and while it’s the weakest of the three, it is, like the previous installments, as much about image-making as it is about the iconic woman at its center. Its Maria, living in Paris toward the end of her life, hasn’t sung onstage in years but still can’t stop performing — whether it’s burbling an aria in the kitchen for her housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), or playing the diva for a TV journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who’s actually a pill-induced hallucination.
All three of these Larraín films play coy with the idea of image as both power and a prison, acknowledging how absurdly elevated a problem that is to wrestle with, while at the same time trying to treat it with the seriousness its subjects demand. But Maria has the toughest time finding that balance and reconciling the imperiousness it wants from its subject with its insistence that she spent most of her life trying to please those around her. The film slips between the miniature productions that make up Maria’s day-to-day in 1977 and ones she did in the past onstage, but there’s nothing behind these displays, no fleshly substance to the character underneath the theatrical costumes and even more sumptuous everyday outfits. The purplish script, by Steven Knight, is written as though every other line were intended not to be spoken as part of a scene but to be highlighted in an eventual trailer. “What did you take?” demands Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) — Maria’s butler and, alongside Bruna, other constant companion — when trying to monitor his mistress’s pill consumption. “I took liberties, all my life, and the world took liberties with me,” she answers. When Feruccio manages to arrange for Maria to see the doctor she’s been avoiding, that doctor tells her reassuringly that he “needs to have a conversation with you about life and death, about sanity and insanity.”
Is Maria insane? She’s definitely meant to be a mess, teetering out of the grasp of her doting domestic help, causing scenes at cafés, and imagining an interview with Smit-McPhee, who shares a name with her preferred brand of downers, when she isn’t trying to rediscover her voice with the help of a pianist (Stephen Ashfield) who might also be a figment. And yet, Maria remains so fastidious with its main character, as well as the actor playing her, unwilling to admit that there might be something as pleasurable as there is tragic about the spectacle of an opera star tearing apart her dressing room in search of a few last Quaaludes. Jolie looks incredible in the film, all angular cheekbones and brocade housecoats, divine in a cat flick eye and beehive in black-and-white flashbacks to her romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Maria looks incredible, too, with cinematographer Edward Lachman giving ’70s Paris the exact look of a vintage postcard, and Larraín staging flights of fantasy that involve choirs turning up out of the crowds on the Place du Trocadero and orchestras sitting on the steps in the rain. But despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked.
