Angelina Jolie portrays opera singer Maria Callas as she reflects on her life of song, love, and pain. Pablo Larrain's visual style is breathtaking, with the large sets of Maria's house and the beautiful shots of 1970s France reminding us that this is a filmmaker always in full command of his craftsmanship. He dives deep into the soul of Callas as she looks deep into herself as well, and Jolie's commanding, multilayered portrayal of the singer is spectacular. Jolie not only wonderfully acts the singing scenes, but shows the aching of a woman whose meaning and sense of self has always been attributed to the one thing she's losing: her voice.
The movie shows us much about who Maria is, but not enough about who she was throughout her life to reach this point -- not factually, but emotionally, making the audience guess all of this. The editing doesn't quite manage to pull us into these dazzling flashbacks of Maria in her prime, and at worst, feel like rather frustrating experiments than actual looks into her memories. Larrain's storytelling eventually dives into self-indulgence; in Spencer, for instance, the filmmaker so effortlessly treats the audience like intellectual viewers who were here to empathize with the woman rather than the phenomenon Diana was. Here, the way he conveys the story feels rather condescending at times, as if we need to be fed more in order to understand his maximalist messages. Jolie is consistently astounding in the titular role, and Larrain's visual style is wonderfully realized, though the narrative approach gets lost along the way in its own pretentious tendencies.
3/5
Review by: Gal Balaban