A Problem Like Maria
You expected Aristotle Onassis
But instead you got
Mister James Fennings from Prestwich, in Cumbria –The Fall
In many ways it is unfortunate that Angelina Jolie’s singing in Maria (Pablo Larraín, 2024), the biopic of Maria Callas in which she plays the soprano during her final days, is so good. Though it is immediately apparent when the audio switches between recordings of Callas and performances by Jolie (how could it not be?) Jolie’s singing is truly impressive. Moreover, the plot, which centres on a Callas who has lost the voice that made her the greatest soprano singer of the last century, gives her leeway. In fact, the breakings and vocal strain on screen are leant authenticity by the doubly-coded effort: Callas trying to recapture the voice of the woman she was reflected through Jolie trying to replicate some sense of the voice of her subject.
The reason that this is unfortunate is that it only serves to throw further into relief how utterly risible the rest of the film is. Almost every aspect, from the casting, the framing, the script, and the editing seems designed to produce the most sterile, forgettable experience possible. This extends to Jolie’s acting, which is so far from being capable of inhabiting the role (admittedly an ambitious one) that it makes her talent for singing almost an embarrassment. A stiff, carbon-copy ageing matriarch, her Callas is a waxwork, a badly-rendered bronze.
Worse still is Kodi Smit-McPhee as Mandrax, the physical manifestation of Callas’s prescription drugs addiction, a part so bad that it might be profitably used in a therapeutic context by Narcotics Anonymous. To be fair, the blame for Haluk Bilginer’s Aristotle Onassis largely lies with the script which makes the man adored by Jackie Kennedy and Callas into mediocre Tintin villain with a grab-bag of swear words walking round saying things like ‘I’m ugly, but I’m rich.’ Such insight!
Steven Knight, who is starting to run out of the good will he deserved for Locke (Steven Knight, 2013), has provided a screenplay worthy of the director’s vision. Every line that is remotely memorable is memorable only for being a cliché, as though the script were a universal skin that only required a name altered here and there, a few dates/locations changing, before being recycled for another project. Of these, Mandrax’s line of consolation to Callas after her lover’s death deserves special mention: ‘She was his wife, you were his life.’
Some of the edits are equally painful, as when Callas tells Onassis on his yacht: ‘To be a possession in a cabinet is not my ambition.’ the camera quickly cuts to a close-up profile of Jolie, imperious as Boudicea, looking over the waves, sweeping music behind her. One must have a heart of stone to avoid laughing at this kind of blunt-force-trauma image of independent womanhood; the sort of “men writing women” feminism our age perhaps deserves but far from being the one it needs.
Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino as Bruna and Ferruccio, Callas’s loyal and long-suffering housekeeper and butler, are the only fresh air the film has. Every moment they are on screen, like the constant assistance they give their employer, is a small mercy for the audience before being sucked back into the film’s muted tomb.
The suffocating feeling the film forces on the viewer is a paradoxical product of its total lack of atmosphere. The narrative is ostensibly supposed to follow Callas in the closing chapter of her life, using hallucinations and ghosts from the past to gate-crash the present in order to tell the story. Much of the action takes place in Callas’ Paris apartment, supplemented with brief visits out into Paris for rehearsals and sitting in cafés to absorb the adulation.
The problem is that none of this, even for a moment, is remotely unsettling or disconcerting. The exterior locations in the first half of the film give the impression not so much of watching a film set in Paris as being slapped in the temple with an Eiffel Tower fridge magnet. The film’s second half, in which the shards and fragments of the past start to take over, takes place in an exhausted quicksand of falsehood without referent. ‘Slowly, slowly, I am looking back at my life, seeing the truth.’ Callas says. Nothing could be further from the truth. None of the eeriness or sense of the alienated world even managed by an above-average but hardly masterful film like Tár (Todd Field, 2022) is available here; just a series of cringe-inducing vignettes.
However, this is really just a set of surface phenomena hiding something far more disturbing. What makes Maria genuinely insidious as a commercial product is a formal property that, for want of a better term, I will call its symptomatic temporality. At its crudest, one might say that the film submits the life of Callas to the temporal regime of the Instagram reel and the Twitter timeline. The scenes from the latter part of the film, which include: a meal with JFK; a meeting between Callas and her sister; Onassis on his deathbed; Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr President and a number of interviews with Mandrax too ludicrous to mention in any more detail, play out like a browser with too many tabs open whilst someone was simultaneously refreshing a different window to try and buy Coldplay tickets. Watching Maria feels like doomscrolling.
This watery formal structure is the reason for the film’s incapacity to generate pathos or dissonance. At one point, as if in desperation to try and force some kind of uncanny feeling into the film, Callas tells her sister: ‘I can’t tell if you’re real.’ before grabbing her arm and digging her nails in. Even this fails to be unsettling. It is the film itself having a tantrum, railing at the fact that its own dull flux proves impossible to shatter. [Equally absurd in this regard is the ham-fisted application of Brian Eno over Maria’s final moments, as though the film’s algorithm were throwing out one last dice roll begging us to please feel something.]
As a result, the film’s mixture of hallucination, time skips, flashback and chopped up shifts in space, produce no kind of reality distortion effect; this experience of time is simply normalised and reflected back into the recent past. The fractures are used solely to be integrated into the continuum of Callas’ life, and their oddness never breaks through to the surface. The chopped up time is never anything but a reconfigured chronology. The film’s time, in doing so, naturalises and authenticates the damaged temporal experience of the contemporary world and its numb sensorium of inevitable deterioration.
The problem with Maria then is that its temporality is fundamentally dehumanising. The scenes are not structured by the operational patterns of human memory or the alienating force of trauma but simply by the objectifying, deadening time of technology. The multiply-present present of Maria is one of flickering short videos, hallucinations that fade out like dead Jedi masters, and scenes which can’t even be called pastiche because they have no genuine register to borrow from and reconfigure. The flattening of all discordant forces into a homogenous numbed march to the grave destroys any sense of evidence in the constructive historical sense, and hope of ‘seeing the truth’, however slowly. In this way Maria is an oddly post-human biopic. The Callas it depicts is like the digital footprint of someone who died: a Facebook profile, a few unseemly tweets, an album of yacht photos left on Flickr. Its memory is the kind of retrospective capitalism might have of us after it has killed us all. This form of time makes Maria not simply a bad example of the genre, but a film that is ontologically dispiriting.
As if to twist the knife, the closing credits contain some super 8mm and super 16mm films of the real Callas that have more charm and more life than the entire biopic that preceded them. To see Callas after watching Maria is to feel the digital shudder of the ghosts in our machines, a feeling that should never be allowed to become the norm.
