Netflix’s ‘Maria’ and Angelina Jolie get Maria Callas all wrong

Here we go again.

In Hollywood’s ongoing, gleeful attempt to contest the joy of music by cutting star classical musicians down to size, “Maria” joins the short parade of “Tár” and “Maestro.” The new biopic by Maria Callas follows the takedown of fictional conductor Lydia Tár and the great Leonard Bernstein with a dramatization of the most compelling singer I’ve ever met – live, on record, on video anywhere. (I’m hardly alone in this assessment.) All three films have this in common: Over-the-top musicians are tragically brought down by their own hubris and become monstrous. Each is a victim of his celebrity—something celebrity-incubating Hollywood happens to be pretty good at.

“Maria,” which began streaming on Netflix this week, focuses on Callas’ withdrawn last year, when she was, if you’re to believe this account, pitifully self-destructive. She had lost her voice and her lover, and she had nothing to live for. She could not recapture the mythical La Callas or make peace with the woman Maria. It is a disgraceful tale of woe and quixotic temperament.

The bleak film begins and ends with Callas’ lonely death. In typical flashback fashion, we witness her decline and delusions as she tries to regain her voice, the attention of Aristotle Onassis, and the adoration of the public. Flashbacks are interspersed with bits and pieces of documentary footage that glimpse a few highlights of her life.

Throughout, the unlikely Angelina Jolie captures Callas’ style in her dress, her public demeanor and her movements. She sports to glossy perfection sensational 50s and 60s hairstyles. She wanted to make an amazing plastic doll of Callas.

The real Callas was striking in another way. Her face did not have Jolie’s spectacular exact proportions. In fact, Callas made out of what she considered to be an ugly duckling. When she first appeared on stage in the late 1940s, she immediately demonstrated a voice to be reckoned with and a glowing vocal theatricality. But she was a large woman and said to be somewhat awkward on stage. Director Franco Zeffirelli described her as big in every way – big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big body – and compared her to the Statue of Liberty.

Seeing the 1953 film “Roman Holiday” made Callas determined to look like her childhood star, Audrey Hepburn. Callas lost 80 pounds in a single year. She had already worked with great directors, notably Luchino Visconti, but now she had the physical means to go much further and invent the modern concept of opera as drama. Her voice had lost some of its luster and those who disliked her blamed the weight loss, which was not the case. It was instead her compulsion to put her whole being into furious theatrical intensity.

On the surface, Callas had become an icon of elegance, but now she could make her big eyes, big mouth and big voice penetrate like nothing anyone in opera had ever experienced. She not only transformed herself, but the art form.

Callas’ operatic career lasted less than two decades, ending in 1965. She was only 42 when she sang her last staged opera performance, a production of “Tosca” at Covent Garden in London. People came up with all sorts of reasons why her voice went so early. Only after her death 12 years later did we learn that she suffered from dermatomyositis, which causes muscle weakness that can affect the vocal cords and probably also led to her heart failure at the age of 53.

Jolie’s voice has been slightly mixed with Callas’s in such a way that it sanitizes Callas’s a bit. Joile’s speaking voice sounds almost like Callas’ but without the hint of Callas’ New York accent. She lacks, crucially, Callas’s disarming smile. None of this could matter as much if director Pablo Larrain had concentrated less on delivering glamor shots of Jolie.

The movie is called “Maria” for a reason. Callas’ was indeed a life of conflict between the artist who magnificently became La Callas and the woman who was Maria. But you have to understand both. She no doubt stopped singing because of her physical condition. Yet her greatness gave her a remarkable ability to transcend biology. Yet her need to become more of the woman she wanted to be drove her obsession with the ultimately toxic Onassis.

I saw how singular the transcendent part of this complex equation could be in her ill-fated 1974 comeback tour with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. As a graduate student at the time, I had an upper balcony seat at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. The acoustics are the best up there and I bought a pair of opera glasses just to see her.

She sounded pretty bad. The voice was gone. But not the intensity, not the presence. This actually turned out to be one of the best songs I’ve ever encountered. She seemed at the same time superhuman and a super-suffering human being. You can’t possibly experience Callas’ wizardry and the music become one in the horrific underground recordings of the concert, available on YouTube and elsewhere.

Better to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film “Medea” from 1969, where Callas plays a purely acting role. Like Larrain with Jolie, Pasolini was fascinated by Callas’ face, especially her nose. He scrutinizes her expressiveness, its extraordinary power. She no longer needs opera, it’s inside her. Pasolini uses music as if he were filming a Noh play, but with the masks off. The fact that this film has so little respect in the opera world and even among Callas fans shows how, if you pay enough attention, she remains ahead of her time.

Her radical sophistication and courage were further evidenced in 1974 when she addressed a Verdi musicology conference in Chicago. She appeared dignified, eloquent, unsentimental and downright revolutionary. She had no reason to waste her time with musicologists and their chatter about neglected early Verdi masterpieces. Knowing what mattered and what didn’t, she suggested they take the best bits from those operas and make something modern and meaningful. She also blamed Puccini for making singers and audiences lazy because he was not challenging enough.

A year later, Onassis died, which is said to have caused Callas to lose interest in life. He had left Callas, whom he never married, to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, but the flame burned in Callas to the end. Her last two years were clearly very difficult, what with drugs, depression and dermatomyositis, all of which come across as tacky in “Maria.” I wonder if she became a recluse in part because patients suffering from dermatomyositis are supposed to stay away from sunlight. Her body failed her.

A more affectionate and imaginative portrait of Callas in those years is the basis of Zeffirelli’s 2002 biopic, “Callas Forever,” starring Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons as her agent. Zeffirelli had worked with Callas and knew her well. To best understand Callas, turn to Tony Palmer’s 2007 documentary “Callas,” where Zeffirelli is particularly illuminating.

All the adoration, the glamour, the high life was for Callas a purposeful life of bread and roses. Rather, her art had always been the way she boldly filled such emptiness with incredible meaning. “Maria”, on the other hand, offers little more than pathos and poses.