From a review of Maria by Donna Perlmutter:
Jolie is so utterly fixated on her own beauty — returning to endless close-ups, sitting often before mirrored dressing tables, all posed — that she fails to observe even a vestige of the Callas look. No altering make-up, no attempt at her semblance. Oh, the glamour, yes, the costumes and high-style street-wear, yes. But no slight nod to facial likeness. Just a display of attire and hair-dos. The sheer effrontery.
A vanity show? Certainly. High-fashion magazine art framed as cinema? Of course. She modelS importantly, courtesy of her collaborators, in the ornate Louis IV Paris apartment, in grand pictorials and vistas against historic backgrounds in Europe and faraway pyramids.
In fact, it is those aspects that take dominance. You could see Jolie luxuriating in her own diva fantasy. She even took voice lessons, in preparation for the film, that resulted in several minutes onscreen of her own tech-aided (?) singing — shown in full-face closeups. (I guess she can’t tell the difference between a Jolie and a Callas.)
Finally, a narrative emerges — with the appearance of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, her paramour. And it does reveal, as do all the Callas biographies, that wealthy, powerful older men were drawn to her as she was to them. They stood, for each other, as the very definition of trophy partners.
There’s even an invented scene with a JFK figure, the two sharing a drink, he and Callas testing each other in witty repartée, discussing his wife Jackie’s liaison with Onassis.
All this, yes. But the film never escapes Hollywood long enough to delve into the Callas magic — the character and sound of her distinctive voice, the timbre that contained its very reservoir of expressive presence, its throbbing heartbeat of humanity, its open vein of a soul. Luckily, some, though not enough, of her recorded excerpts were included.
For Callas it was the tightrope of life in all its vocal dimensions that she telegraphed — sometimes even with an under-par pitch or an elicited wobble.
“The voice is a weapon,” she once said, “an instrument to hit at core emotions.” Veritable music drama was the goal, not tonal beauty and technical acrobatics. Let the Renata Tebaldis and the Lily Ponses walk off with those prizes, although you could not call her a slouch in that department either.
But director Larrain chose to stay with the considerable story line — a fat and homely, Greek-American child whose mother semi-pimped her out as a teen-ager to American and German soldiers in war-time Athens. Thereafter she boasted a huge musical talent and later shed 70 pounds to become an international star — something far easier to follow in a movie, than the artistry that made Callas unique.
Also a treasured fillip are his footage clips of her 1973 Farewell Concert in London, showing a statuesque Callas of utmost poise and elegance at curtain calls, but not a whisper of put-on humility or queenly demeanor.
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