Maria

This is a beautifully shot, beautifully costumed, and beautifully colored film. It shows the final week of Maria Callas’ life in a very calculated way that lines up the dots to portray her as tragic, fiercely independent, drug-addled, and completely self-centered.

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But if one reads Callas’ Wikipedia page, one discovers that what is shown in this movie isn’t nearly the truth of her life, except the part about her and Aristotle Onassis loving each other.

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There is speculation on why Maria stopped singing: was it the rapid weight loss that affected her ability to support her diaphragm, the early onset of menopause, unhappiness due to her relationship with her mother, drug use, smoking, taking on roles that were hard on her voice, a faltering in her self-confidence, or was it the relationship with Onassis?

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The movie plainly suggests that Onassis asked her not to sing anymore. If that were true, that would put her on the long list of women (like Amy Winehouse, Margot Fonteyn, Whitney Houston, etc.) who were at the peak of their powers and were pulled down by a rotten man. Was that the case here? Callas’ Wikipedia page does not corroborate that perspective.

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What we know for sure is that in 1975 (two years before she died) a doctor diagnosed her with dermaomyositis, a rare connective tissue disease that can affect the larynx. That doctor prescribed steroids (which are terrible for the voice and which destroy the liver).

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We also know from recordings made shortly before her death and Callas' own comments that she never lost her voice, but lost strength in her diaphragm, which lead to a lack of confidence which, in turn, lead to her voice becoming wobbly.

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Regardless of why Maria Callas stopped singing, history shows us that she was a once-in-a-generation talent who blew open the doors for opera singers who came after her. Because her voice was such a force, she was able to sing things (sometimes in the same week) that previous convention said she shouldn’t be able to sing at all.

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She was extremely motived to learn, to grow as a singer, and to perform. She was beautiful, a great actress, and she had emotional control over her voice which allowed her to move audiences with her performances.

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This movie seems to me to be a vehicle for Angelina Jolie to shift the public’s perception of her far, far away from the blood-wearing bad girl of the Billy Bob Thornton days and beyond the harassed-wife of Brad Pitt years. I’ve seen a fair amount of videos made for the press of this movie and in them Ms. Jolie carries herself completely differently than she has in the past. It's as if she’s seeking to align herself with Maria Callas: tragic, isolated, and lonely in the rarified spaces that her beauty and talent place her.

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I’m not sure what i feel about this movie. I don’t feel it gave me an understanding of Maria Callas, the reason why she stopped singing, nor the reasons why she basically killed herself with her drug taking. This movie lines up the dots in such a way that what the viewer takes away is what a beautiful woman Angelina Jolie is.