Angelina Jolie sings, but Calla's film is not successful

Angelina Jolie deserves a few flowers for her solid performance as Maria Callas in the biopic “Maria,” even if the film doesn’t quite do the opera legend justice.

“Maria” (★★½ out of four; rated R; streaming now on Netflix) is the final installment in director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy about haunted iconic women. While the previous (and far better) films – “Jackie” and “Spencer” – leaned more toward horror in their tragic stories, “The Closer” finds Callas in her final days, reliving her life for a television interview lets pass and wrestles with the ghosts of past roles as well as the remnants of a once spectacular voice. The melodrama is packed with more style – so, so much style – than narrative substance, although Jolie (who received a Golden Globe nomination this week for her performance) commits fully to the role, both emotionally and musically.

“Maria” focuses on the last week of the American Greek soprano’s life in 1977, living in a large Paris apartment many years after her public retirement. At 53 years old, she is still a real diva. She sings while her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) prepares an omelette and orders her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) to move around a huge piano, even though he has a bad back.

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Maria is also a hot mess. Sick and in poor health – her diet consists mostly of prescription pills – Maria recounts nightly visits from her wealthy late lover, the “ugly and dead” Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer). Sometimes she is the great “La Callas” and sometimes she is just Maria. Sometimes she hides from the world, sometimes she wants to eat at a restaurant where she will be recognized because “I feel like being admired.”

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But even after burning her old opera costumes, she longs to strengthen her voice so much that she can sing again, even if just for herself. “I don’t want to go yet,” Callas tells her pianist in a sentence full of layered meaning.

Much of “Maria” plays out in a fantastical way – there are flashbacks to different eras in different visual styles – and even her “real” life moves like a fever dream. It’s no coincidence that the journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who comes to her for her interview, has the same name as Callas’ main medication.

Her time in the opera and in public is shown in different phases, such as when she had to entertain Nazis in her youth and coldly confronted John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) when he inquired whether Onassis was spending time with his wife . But the film shows its true heart in the scenes where Bruna and Ferruccio are there to help Maria even as she tries her best to fall apart.

The opera numbers are striking and beautiful, with great costumes and great production design. They also illuminate one of the film’s biggest weaknesses: Jolie learned to sing opera for the role, and through Hollywood magic, Larraín created tracks that mixed the voices of both the actress and the real Callas – to varying degrees depending on the time frame . A number of these scenes seem lip-synced and artificial, although this mix works better in the moments when Maria’s voice is at its roughest and roughest in the film.

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Angelina Jolie sings, but Calla’s film is not successful

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