DRAMA; 2hr 3min
STARRING: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee

Final curtain: Jolie
As he did with 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, director Pablo Larraín slips with a velvety splash beneath the skin of 53-year-old American-Greek opera singer Maria Callas (Jolie). Spencer screenwriter Steven Knight’s tone poem begins with the discovery of Callas’s body in her Paris apartment on September 16, 1977, then circles back to a poignant interpretation of the final week of her life.
By that end point, a reclusive Callas hasn’t sung onstage in four-and-a-half years. Despite the “intoxication” of the lifeblood performance experience, she feels physically and psychologically unable to deliver the vocal “miracles” her adoring audiences have come to expect.
Yet Maria has never lost her desire to sing, even as she subsists on a cushioning diet of the sedative Mandrax and a concentrated torrent of memories. Although her butler (Favino) and housekeeper (Rohrwacher) are endlessly kind, Maria is profoundly alone in her self-containment. Her only other companions are the hallucinatory illusions of too many pills, with Bilginer appearing as her power-mongering former lover Aristotle Onassis and Smit-McPhee as documentary maker Mandrax.
Maria, it seems, has a bone-dry awareness of irony, along with a single-minded desire to summon her voice again, if only to prove to herself she still can. But her body is failing, its heart and liver weakened by medicated excess. According to her doom-merchant doctor (Vincent Macaigne), the Herculean effort of singing could kill her.
Jolie’s dedication to her role is as immersive as Maria’s own needs and wants: the actress studied opera for months, and along with obligatory lip-synching, she does some heavy lifting herself — no stroll down any boulevard with such a sky-high benchmark. The weight of Maria’s sadness is the base note of Larraín’s baroque Parisian settings. But her uncanny soprano is the legacy that continues to define her, laying her soul bare while cloaking the woman she was in mystery.
