Chilean director Pablo Larrain (El Conde, 2023) is further building a platform for himself as an intriguing, contemporary, art house film director. His latest film, Maria, is a thoughtful, understated biopic on the final seven days of the life of Maria Callas, the iconic opera singer who gained international acclaim in the 1950s and 60s. As she struggles with illness, loneliness, and her diminished singing voice in 1977, Maria Callas quietly faces her legacy and her losses.
Because of Pablo Larrain's slightly abstract and patiently intuitive style, this film is not a biographical tale concerned with the historically significant events in a person's life or how a person has developed or achieved greatness over time. Instead, Maria is more a private retrospective look at a person's emotional identity at one point in time, specifically on how it feels realizing your life is nearing its end.
Maria is a gamble for three main reasons. First is the rarity of films about opera and opera singers. This subject matter is often untouched in mainstream Hollywood, and this film has a lot of opera singing and classical music adding to its drama and deep sincerity. The only other film about opera I can immediately think of is the 1999 drama, Topsy-Turvy about Gilbert and Sullivan.
Second is the casting of Angelina Jolie in the title role. She hasn't starred in anything on screen since 2021, and the two films she's in from that year are disappointments (Those Who Wish Me Dead and Eternals). Angelina Jolie is also not an experienced singer, although she did take opera singing lessons for seven months prior to filming.
And third, director Pablo Larrain has described his biopics as "cultural fantasy," because for him, it's not possible to recreate the exact true life of a real person with 100% historical accuracy and truthfulness. (If you want that, please watch the wonderous 2017 documentary, Maria by Callas.) Leaning away from the conventional, or expected, biopic with Maria takes viewers into an unfamiliar grey area where imagined conversations are mixed with touches of recorded fact. (Not something mainstream audiences are used to.)
This director has created similar treatments with his past biopics, Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021) making Maria the third entry in this accidental trilogy of famous, glamorous, 20th century women.
I have to say, Maria is very moving like the other films in this trilogy. Its slow, methodical pacing and delicate, pensive dialogue gives a funereal, yet warm, mood. And shooting this film in the gorgeous locations of Greece, Italy, Hungary, and France easily adds to the grandeur and beauty. Now let's get to the biggest question coming from this: What is the singing like? How much singing does Angelina Jolie actually do? And my answer is ... it's a mix.
In the flashbacks showing Maria Callas on stage in her prime, Angelina lip syncs to Maria's recorded voice. In the present tense of the film, Angelina's singing voice is used ... but in part. Her singing is not shown here totally by itself but is captured in an engineered mix; some songs including five percent of her voice some songs including 70%. This mixing work is achieved well by musical engineer John Warhurst who worked on the singing for other recent biopics, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) with Rami Malek and Bob Marley: One Love (2024) with Kingsley Ben-Adir.
But this range of her [Angelina's] differing singing contributions does not deter from her performance overall. She gives the regal dignity of an iconic figure in music, balancing determination with sorrow and reality with hallucination. (The mysterious moments of hallucination are a big part of why this film moved me.) The close-ups of her face provide heart-tugging moments as she uses a stoic resolve to mask her increasing fragility.
But her overall performance is not flawless, because her lip syncing falls flat. When she is lip syncing, I could tell she is lip syncing, which makes many of the triumphant moments of song feel much less powerful than they're intended to be. This also undercuts the believability of her whole performance.
Now I'm far from a professional drag queen, but I know the difference between effective and less effective lip syncing. (Maybe we're all more aware of what good lip syncing is from the popularity of drag culture with Rupaul's Drag Race on TV so much.) Good lip syncing can be done with precision like Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) or Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose (2007). But precision is not found in the lip syncing of Maria. The rest of the film is good though functioning as a wistful love letter to a woman whose talents should never be forgotten.