by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
We’re in the thick of it now.
It’s officially awards season, and one of the major players is expected to be Angelina Jolie for her starring performance in Maria, a cataloguing of the final days of the opera singer Maria Callas’ life.
Jolie doesn’t act in many projects anymore, with her last role coming three years ago in Eternals, and the last 15 years or so largely populated by Kung Fu Pandasequels and Maleficent movies. In all honesty, I’ve found her recent producing projects to be much more interesting.
However, when her role as the complicated opera singer has been as lauded and hyped as this, it’s something I’m definitely going to check out. There’s no doubt that it’s a really good performance, and there’s a lot Jolie is asked to do. Playing Callas in both in the final week of her life and (most) flashbacks, we get to see both her highs and her lows. We get glimpses of her at the height of her celebrity and trying to recapture the magic of her voice in a process that puts her through the wringer.
However, with performance pieces like this, if I’m not completely overwhelmed by the performance, the movie as a whole can leave me a bit wanting, and this one doesn’t quite reach that desired level. It probably doesn’t help that, personally, an operatic tragedy is not necessarily my cup of tea. I will admit that director Pablo Larraín (Jackie and Spencer) uses a tragic structure to tell the story to good effect. There’s some clever work with what’s there and what’s not as we go on a journey through Maria’s fractured mind in a way that is represented well.
Technically, the film is well-shot, and there are some really clever editing choices. The cuts back and forth between time are smartly done, and I liked the use of montage over “Ave Maria” to give some background on Callas for the uninitiated. However, other choices, like the continued use of home movie interstitials, helped break whatever immersion I was supposed to be having. This is where the subject matter hurts, too. I was never sucked in. Could I see it was a tragic story? Yes. But it left me largely distant, which made the runtime just north of two hours feel closer to three.
Though I’m not the most familiar with Larraín’s work, both this and his Netflix effort from last year, El Conde, leave me feeling that he just does not make movies I connect with. I can’t in good conscience call them bad; there’s too much skill on display for that, but I don’t vibe with them either. And that’s a shame, because I like Jolie taking on a project that allows her to show off the chops there’s a good chance the wide pop culture world has largely forgotten earned her an Oscar. So I’m saddened that as award season kicks into high gear, I expect I’ll find my rooting interest more invested in most any other performance in what’s expected to be a packed, competitive Best Lead Actress race.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
Maria is currently streaming on Netflix
You can read more from Jake Bourgeois, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd