Along with the likes of Judy Garland, Maria Callas is in the pantheon of superstars whose magnetic stage personality and charisma continue to enchant audiences. And so the new Netflix biopic, "Maria" -- starring another superstar, Angelina Jolie -- is bound to grab people's attention. Unfortunately, the Netflix effort misses an opportunity to illuminate some key aspects of Callas' life, most notably her exploitation by her overbearing mother, as well as the singer's profound lack of self-worth.
Netflix's "Maria" uses Mr. Mandrax, a reporter that Callas hallucinates, as a storytelling device to propel Callas's life review. In real life, Callas used the sedative Mandrax, a drug that typically does not cause hallucinations, to help her fall asleep. Callas tells Mr. Mandrax that many stories told about her are "pure fabrications" -- but to those who have studied the diva's life, it is the film's storyline that feels fabricated.
Callas died in abject despair, secluded in her Paris apartment. In her last interview with the French reporter Philippe Caloni, she acknowledged having become useless and she appeared envious of the younger generation of opera singers and conductors. Franco Zeffirelli, the famous Italian opera director and a close friend who saw the diva six months before her death, was appalled by her paranoid fears that made her terrified to go outside, lest she be kidnapped by passers-by. Contrary to the film's insinuation that Callas spent her final days trying to find her own voice ("Now I will sing for myself"), and to regain the control denied by her mother and long-term partner Aristotle Onassis, the aging Callas's tragic story was that she had, in fact, no story to tell. Her life's narrative had been irreparably interrupted.
Maria Callas created a life -- and an image -- of mastery and control, an aura of peerless achievement. Yet, also like the lives of other tragic stars, her life ended under the grip of drug addiction, illustrating what the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller called "the drama of the gifted child." She fell victim to early exploitation by a pushy and discontented parent. Callas' career was orchestrated by her mother who, transplanted against her will from Greece to New York City and unhappily married, saw her child as a ticket to riches and the fulfillment of her own frustrated ambition to have a career on stage.
Callas learned to embrace her mother's grandiose ambitions and vision of success. And eventually, those elements of her personality masked her ever-present and profound self-doubt -- this is where the drama lies.
"Do my parents love me or my talent?" is the question that many gifted children with pushy parents ask themselves. The tragedy is compounded by the asynchrony between the gifted child's ambitions, which drive their behavior but never feel quite real, and their own inner ideals, which feel real but remain unrealized. Callas, like Garland, sought her identity in the roles she enacted on stage. This elevated her to the highest echelons of operatic artistry, surpassing arguably the accomplishments of any other soprano of the recorded era. But it never filled the void, the split between her outer persona as an operatic diva and her inner sense of being a flawed woman.
Netflix's portrayal of the last days of Callas's life as a defiant struggle to create her own, authentic voice misses an opportunity to engage with the pertinent issue of the price paid by children whose parents push them toward lucrative careers, against the child's own desires. The film also ignores the true tragedy of aging individuals who find it hard to develop a coherent life narrative, one that enables graceful aging but also allows them to accept their past without undue regret. The precipitous decline of Callas' voice and her unexpected abandonment by Onassis (in favor of Jackie Kennedy) were undeniably challenging experiences. Yet, Rosa Ponselle, another 20th-century diva to rival Callas, suffered similarly challenging losses and managed to adapted to them by becoming the doyenne of the Philadelphia Opera. In contrast, Callas cut off all her ties with the operatic world.
Despite these criticisms, there is much to love about "Maria," including the film's visual splendor with its meticulous reconstruction of scenes from Callas' life as captured in photos and film clips. And Angelina Jolie's performance is magnetic as she merges herself with the role of someone trying desperately to find her own true self.
The film ends with a series of truthful but disjointed images from Callas' life, including those of an exploited daughter, jilted lover, operatic superstar, isolated addict and an aging women finding agency. It doesn't add up to a consistent, believable story. In the end, perhaps this is the closest "Maria" comes to portraying the truth underlying the last days of Callas's life, which lacked narrative cohesion, too.