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Maria

“Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am. I'm in the mood for adulation.” Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie)

“Maria” is a study in restraint, the aloof persona of Maria Callas, the 20th century opera diva who died in 1977 at age 53. Angelina Jolie, a motion picture diva, plays her as a reserved former star in the last week of her life. Through the cliched device of an imagined interviewer, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), flashbacks abound through another device, black and white to denote times ago.

Such a portrait, however, does not good cinema make. The cinematic visual is close to perfection, drawing rooms and concert halls whose immaculate design emphasizes Callas’s perfection of voice and arctic mien. Shots through narrow doorways and long-distance shots enforce the design to show her isolation. Her notorious temper rarely appears so tightly does Jolie play the closed-in Callas except when she goes after any reporter who breaks into her personal life.

 The storied voice was being lost in midlife to drug overdose and debilitation along with strain. Jolie successfully reflects the diva’s strong-headed refusal to comply with doctors’ advice that she not sing or take drugs. Thus, her early death.

 “Maria” is best when director Pablo Lorrain takes it down to unpretentiousness as he did in Spencer, and to some respects Jackie, unadulterated thoughts about women stressed by fame are punctuated by impassioned moments where this movie has few.

 Callas’s confrontation with JFK is the kind of repartee, mostly about Jackie and Onassis, crackles by contrast. It depicts a diva in decline where the dramatic value of someone so closed in on herself can be limited entertainment for an audience not needing to experience the gloom of a preeminent artist in decline.

” I come to restaurants to be adored.” Callas

 Maria

Director: Pablo Larrain (Jackie, Spencer)

Screenplay: Steven Knight (Locke)

Cast: Angelina Jolie (Maleficent)

Rating: R

Length: 2h 4m

 John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com

 

 

John DeSando