©Courtesy of Netflix
Maria, Pablo Larraín’s biopic of opera singer Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, will debut on Netflix on December11, two weeks after its release to select theaters. The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its debut at the recent 81st Venice International Film Festival.
According to the official synopsis: “The film follows the American-Greek soprano as she retreats to Paris after a glamorous and tumultuous life in the public eye. Maria reimagines the legendary soprano in her final days as the diva reckons with her identity and life.”
The screenplay for Maria was written by Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders. Besides Jolie, the supporting cast includes Haluk Bilginer, Pierfrancesco Favino, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Larrain had recently directed critically acclaimed films about two other iconic women: Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana.
It’s anticipated that the film will put Angelina Jolie in serious contention for an Academy Award and other honors. Her last Oscar nomination was for Changeling in 2008, and she won a best supporting actress trophy in 1999 for Girl, Interrupted.
In advance of its theatrical and Netflix releases, Maria will be screened at the New York Film Festival on September 29 and at he AFI Film Festival on October 26.
Advance reviews have been mixed, however. Kaleem Aftab of Time Out wrote: “This enjoyable biopic offers a loving and affectionate portrait of Callas that never airbrushes her foibles. It’s likely to put Jolie front and center in the Oscar race, too.” And David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter concluded that: “The naked emotionality and piercing tragedy of the immortal operatic heroines is a poignant fit for Callas’ end-of-life story and a useful counterpoint to her studied poise and aloofness in this interpretation.”
However, Richard Lawson declared in a less-than-enthusiastic review for Variety that “There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film. With a few details removed, Maria could be about any grand diva, this blurry picture of a woman swanning through the final week of her life.” And Kyle Smith harrumphed in the Wall Street Journal that “Ms. Jolie is fantastically regal as La Callas contemplates a comeback in her palatial Paris apartment in the 1970s, but her vamping, and a surfeit of languid lounging, makes it seem like a humorless retread of Sunset Boulevard.”
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