On a new movie about Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie
Maria Callas was born on December 2, 1923, meaning that her centennial was about a year ago. I wrote a piece, saying essentially everything I have to say about her. Let me not assume knowledge of Callas: She was an opera singer, paradigmatic (and enigmatic, to a degree).
Having had my say, and being pretty much spent on the subject, why am I returning to Callas today? “Next year,” I wrote in my centennial piece, “a movie, a biopic, will come out, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie.” It has come out. I do not intend to write a proper review of the movie. You can find those elsewhere. I will simply jot a few notes, which may be of interest.
Larraín is a Chilean director, and his new movie is called “Maria.” He seems to specialize in such movies, and such titles: In 2016 came Jackie, about Mrs. Onassis (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis); in 2021 came Spencer, about Princess Diana, who, before she married Charles, was Lady Diana Spencer.
As you recall, the lives of Callas and Jackie O. intersected. Callas dumped her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, for Aristotle Onassis. (Rotten, stupid, and ruinous move, according to some.) Callas and Onassis never married. He did marry Jackie, for whom he had dumped Maria.
A tight, tawdry, “high society” circle.
Larraín’s Maria starts with its subject’s death in Paris, on September 16, 1977. Callas was 53. The music we hear is the Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello — an excellent choice, like other musical choices in the film. Maria will give us the last week of Callas’s life, with assorted flashbacks.
So this is indeed a “biopic,” if not a complete one. (More on this in due course.)
Angelina Jolie captures Maria Callas: her look, her style, her way of speaking. Jolie did her homework. She is also about the right age for the part (although, at 49, she is younger than Callas when she died).
Evidently, Jolie does her own singing from time to time. This is meant to show the decline of Callas’s voice. (No offense to Jolie.) Also, however, Callas does a lot of singing, via her recordings. We sometimes hear this music out of Jolie’s mouth. That is, she is dubbed by Callas.
It is jarring to hear such a familiar voice out of someone who is not Callas. It is jarring to see such a familiar face — Jolie’s — and hear that other voice. Two divas, sort of blending.
One of the flashbacks is to Greece, in the Nazi occupation. In my centennial piece, I wrote,
Maria’s mother was a stage mother. And a nightmare. Suffice it to say it’s remarkable that Maria turned out as normal, and stable, as she was (and she was not particularly normal or stable).
It seems to be established that Callas’s mother pimped out her daughters to the Nazis. What effect would that have on a person, for the rest of her life?
The movie includes a tête-à-tête — invented, I believe — between Maria and JFK. The president is kind of a jerk, a boor. My sense is, he was smooth (whatever the behavior that followed the smoothness).
Throughout the movie, Jolie’s Callas is given some good lines, including this one, to her valet: “Book me a table at the café where the waiters know who I am. I’m in the mood for adulation.”
It is beautiful to look at, this film. Jolie is beautiful to look at. Callas, in clips, is beautiful to look at. So is the Parisian apartment, so is Paris itself, so is pretty much everything else. The film is a visual achievement.
I have linguistic bones to pick (as I would). The “La” in “La traviata” is wrong out of Jolie’s mouth. This should have been corrected. She puts a double el in “La Scala,” making it sound like “La Scalla.” I am not blaming Jolie; there should have been coaches, dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
Having a drink with her sister, Maria says, “A toast to memories shared only by you and I.” Maria Callas was a smart cookie, and American-born. I don’t think her grammatical sense would have allowed her to say those words.
Here is something else weird. A young journalist says, “Should I call you ‘Maria’ or “La Callas’?” The journalist is interviewing her over several days. Some days, he calls the singer “Maria,” other days “La Callas.”
But no one ever called her “La Callas.” You refer to someone as “La Callas” or “La Tebaldi” or whatever. But you don’t call someone that. You say, “La Callas was in very good form.” You don’t say, “Hey, La Callas, what time you got?”
Right?
By the way, the young journalist’s name is “Mandrax.” He is not real. He is hallucinated, by a woman under the effects of the drug Mandrax. Apparently, Callas’s last days were like that — addled, frustrated, sad.
She is desperate to regain her historic voice. How did she lose it, by the way? Oh, there are lots of theories and papers and books about this, as I said in my centennial piece. I think Tito Gobbi got it right. (The great baritone was both a friend and a colleague of Callas’s.) He said, simply, “She lost her confidence.”
Yup. Bob Rotella, a famous sports psychologist, wrote a book called “Golf Is a Game of Confidence.” So is singing, so are other things.
At the end of Maria, the singer rallies herself for one last performance, singing through her open windows. The music is “Vissi d’arte.” (Angelina Jolie, lip-synching, does not quite breathe right — does not breathe credibly — here.) You know the words: “I lived for art, I lived for love.”
Let me quote from my centennial piece:
Many sopranos, when they sing “Vissi d’arte” (Tosca’s aria), sing it as a beautiful prayer, or love song. It is really beautiful. When Callas sang it, however, every word meant something. She sang with the “dramatic truth.” God, what the hell? Why are you doing this to me? Why do you repay me thus? There were tones of accusation, and plangency, and anger, and bewilderment, in her voice.
Hers was not the most beautiful “Vissi d’arte.” (I would award that prize to Leontyne Price.) But it was perhaps the truest.
When the movie ends, and the credits are rolling, we see news clips of Callas — the real Callas — and what appear to be home movies. In these latter clips, Callas is kind of goofing off, relaxing, letting her hair down. The use of these clips — the formal ones and the informal ones — is an inspired idea. We are reminded, “Yes, she was real” (and not always miserable).
It is a very good movie — a movie that achieves its goals, I think. It is not complete. Maybe it’s not right to ask a biopic to be complete. Maria shows some parts, some sides, to Maria. Fine. It is a movie about a tormented celebrity — kind of an airhead, certainly a headcase.
But the thing about Callas is: She was really, really smart. A frickin’ genius, in a way. You would probably not get this from Maria.
Let me quote from my piece:
Celebrity aside, Callas was a stunning musician, of whom other musicians were in awe. Even today, musicians bring her up, when discussing greatness. These include musicians who were born long after she died. I have been interviewing musicians for many years, especially at the Salzburg Festival. “Callas” comes up like clockwork.
A little more:
Maria had uncanny musical intelligence. Even conductors were in awe of this (and they have the reputation of not being in awe of anybody, except themselves). Leonard Bernstein once referred to Callas as “the Bible of opera.”
She had uncanny theatrical intelligence. Luchino Visconti, the film director, began directing operas because she was in them. Callas was the very definition of a “singing actress.”
The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini said that Callas embodied the “trilogy” of opera: “words, music, and action.”
I could go on, and did in that piece. I accept Pablo Larraín’s Maria on its own terms. A beautiful movie, saying, or showing, some true things about Callas. Would anyone watch a movie about art, and artistic greatness, and the artistic process? The cynic in me (realist?) says: Damn few.
Another question: What would Callas think? I think she would have a lot to say. I think she would embrace Angelina Jolie — and that the two of them would enjoy a long, laughing, teary talk.
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