‘Maria’, Angelina Jolie’s new film that could take her to the Oscars

MoviesActors and ActressesOperaAcademy Awards (Oscars)Callas, MariaJolie, AngelinaVenice International Film Festival

In her new film, Jolie alternates strength and vulnerability with a pair of powerful operatic scenes in which she sings directly to the camera.

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She’s one of the most famous actresses in history, but how formidable is Angelina Jolie’s filmography?

After winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted (1999), Jolie went on to make some big hits like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, as well as a string of mediocre films (who remembers Taking Lives, Once Upon a Time, or A Life in Seven Days?). Jolie’s most recent films, Those Who Wish Me Dead and Eternals, were both released in 2021, and her only Oscar nomination dates back to 2008, for Clint Eastwood’s The Substitute.

Jolie has said she takes frequent breaks from acting to spend time with her family, but it’s been a while since a film really took advantage of all she has to offer. Perhaps that’s why Venice Film Festival reporters were quick to announce her career comeback with Maria, starring Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas: finally, a project that knows how to make the most of her stardom.

Directed by Pablo Larraín, Maria shows the soprano near the end of her life, as she reflects on the pressures of fame, her tortured romance with wealthy shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (played by Haluk Bilginer) and a singing career that began to falter as Callas lost confidence in her voice. It’s a meaty role that allows Jolie to alternate between strength and tremulous vulnerability with a pair of operatic scenes in which she sings directly to the camera, asking the viewer to marvel at her movie-star visage.

Musical biopics tend to be very popular with Oscar voters, and at Thursday’s press conference about Maria, the first question was whether Jolie suspected she might have a shot at the awards by taking the role. The actress was reticent, saying she was most eager to please opera fans familiar with Callas.

“My fear would be to disappoint them,” Jolie said. “Of course, if there is a response to the work in my profession, I would welcome it.”

By focusing on a famous woman dealing with the glare of the spotlight, Maria forms a trilogy with Larraín’s films Jackie (2016), starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, and Spencer (2021), starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. (That Onassis was romantically involved with both Callas and Kennedy suggests an alternate version of Larraín’s work in which the Greek shipping magnate would appear in post-credits sequences, à la Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, to recruit Larraín’s leading ladies into an Avengers team of best-actress hopefuls.)

“When you work with Pablo, you can’t do anything halfway,” Jolie said. To prepare for the film, she spent several months on vocal training and Italian lessons. Although Larraín asked Jolie to sing the arias live on the set, what we hear in the film are archival recordings of Callas with some of Jolie’s singing technologically mixed in.

Jolie said she was “terribly nervous” when she was asked to sing and kept apologising to the crew for her performance. However, spending so much time immersed in opera encouraged her to fall in love with the emotionally dynamic art form, she said: “When you’ve felt a certain level of despair or pain of love, at a given moment, there are only a few sounds that can encapsulate that feeling.”

Jolie has recently been embroiled in a dispute with her ex-husband Brad Pitt, who will be in Venice in three days for the premiere of his new film Wolves. The festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, has said that the programming of the two films was arranged so that Jolie and Pitt would not have to see each other.

At Maria’s press conference, Jolie sometimes seemed to allude to her problems with Pitt. Asked how she related to Callas, who experienced her fair share of romantic pain and despair, Jolie chose her words carefully. “There are many things I’m not going to say in this room that you probably already know or assume,” she told reporters. “I share her vulnerability more than anything.”

Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture journalist and serves as the Times’ awards season columnist. More from Kyle Buchanan