Maria Parent Guide

With her legendary opera career in the past, famous soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) sings only for herself, her housekeeper, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), and her butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). To be honest, she rarely sings at all, spending much of her time sleeping and abusing her prescription sedatives – activities which go hand in hand. Recently, however, she’s started hallucinating. The visions are mild, hardly distressing, and usually take the form of a person from Maria’s past. These phantom images speak or sing with her, and since the visions aren’t frightening, Maria would like to keep having them. But the delusions worry Bruna and Ferruccio, who are trying to persuade Maria to see a doctor – and not just for the hallucinations.

Biographical dramas live and die on the strength of their casts. Thankfully, although this film’s plot tends to run on its own (occasionally agonizing) time, the performances are, across the board, worth sitting through the dragging pacing. Jolie, Favino, and Rohrwacher are all fascinating on screen. They manage to wring a lot of drama out of long silences and unhurried looks, and the film is surprisingly emotional largely due to their impressive work.

Opera lovers will, obviously, enjoy the film’s score, and since opera is the entirety of said score, opera haters can consider themselves forewarned. Jolie has a decent resemblance to Callas, but lip-syncing convincingly is tricky, especially with such a distinctive voice, and sometimes it just doesn’t seem like Callas’s voice is coming out of Jolie’s mouth.

Maria isn’t a movie for young viewers, and while there are content-related reasons for that – namely, the occasional profanity and frequent substance use – it’s mostly because the movie is a long, slow, historical biopic. Performance and music notwithstanding, you’re just not going to get a kid to sit through enough of this movie to even get to the part where Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) starts cussing.

I enjoyed Maria more than I thought I would, considering I’m hit-and-miss with biopics, opera, and Angelina Jolie movies. Somehow, this one managed to thread the needle and remain interesting to me, but maybe that’s just my hibernation instinct kicking in. Sometimes, a cold, snowy day demands a slow, thoughtful film.