At the Academy Awards ceremony held earlier this year, Emma Stone was awarded her second best actress Oscar, a mere seven years after winning her first. You might think that winning multiple acting Oscars would be an extreme rarity, but you would be wrong. Stone became the 45th performer ever conferred more than one.
Why do I bring this up? Because if anyone thinks that Angelina Jolie cannot win the best actress Oscar at the next Academy Awards ceremony because she already won once before — in a different category, mind you, best supporting actress, for Girl, Interrupted, which came out exactly 25 years ago — then I’ve got news for you: think again.
Jolie has certainly made a strong case for herself with a daring, tour de force performance as the legendary but troubled opera singer Maria Callas in Maria, the final installment of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s unofficial trilogy about remarkable women of the 20th century who died too young (the prior two were 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer), which had its North American premiere on Saturday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival, just a day after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
First, let’s address the obvious question: Callas had one of the greatest voices of all time. Jolie is playing her. How could they possibly make Jolie, who, to my knowledge, has never done much singing before — unlike actresses who have played Callas on stage in Master Class, including Patti LuPone and Zoe Caldwell — sound like “La Divina”? The answer, apparently, is that Jolie studied for months and did perform the music that we hear in the film — which was then digitally blended with Callas’ own voice.
Whatever they did, it worked as well as one could hope for, because while one knows that Jolie cannot sing like Callas, there is no evidence of that on screen — good luck finding any examples of the movement of her mouth not matching the sound of the voice coming out of the speakers. If there had been, that would have been the end of this movie. Instead, it’s just the beginning.
Jolie plays Callas — who at one time was one of the most famous women in the world and was incessantly hounded by the press, something Jolie knows a little about — as a woman in her early fifties who is haunted by the sound of her own voice when it was stronger, to the extent that she cannot even listen to recordings of it. These days, she only really leaves her exquisite apartment in Paris when she needs a shot of adulation from fans. Most of the time, against the pleas of her loyal butler (Pierfrancesco Favino, who looks like Alfred Molina) and housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher, who looks like Andrea Riseborough), she pops a lot of pills, which chip away at her physical and mental health, and one of which, in particular, triggers the illusion that she is being interviewed about her life by a journalist who isn’t really there (Power of the Dog Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee). Through this somewhat shameless exposition device, we learn about the ups and downs of her rollercoaster life.
One can quibble about things like the film’s pacing, and it is, at times, a bit meandering. But one cannot quibble Jolie’s performance or those of the lesser known actors who surround her, including Valeria Golino, who plays her sister Yakinthi Callas, and Haluk Bilginer, who plays her lover Aristotle Onassis, both of whom make the very most of their brief screen time.
As for Academy recognition, you can take to the bank a best actress nom for Jolie, which would follow in the sizable footsteps of Natalie Portman’s nom for Jackie and Kristen Stewart’s nom for Spencer. Jackie also was nominated for best costume design and original score. Maria has no original score, but it does have stunning outfits and jewelry by Massimo Cantini Parrini, so another costume nom could be in store. The legendary lenser Ed Lachman landed a best cinematography nom earlier this year for a film that very few people saw, El Conde, so he can certainly land another for this film, which Netflix — having acquired the U.S. distribution rights to the film earlier this week — will certainly promote the hell out of. And given what a wide open season this is, one cannot rule out a directing nom for Larraín or a best original screenplay nom for Steven Knight.
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