Angelina Jolie soars into the Oscar race with Venice film ‘Maria’

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There has, naturally, been some skepticism about Angelina Jolie – not exactly known for her great musical performances in film – taking on the role of Maria Callas in director Pablo Larraín’s “Maria.”

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Maria. Callas. As in one of the greatest opera singers in history.

“I didn’t sing before this, so I haven’t done karaoke,” Jolie said, jovially, during a Thursday news conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie premiered to a rapturous standing ovation that night. (A reporter had asked her to name her favourite karaoke song.)

Just let that soak in. Sure, Hollywood has a long history of lauding non-singing actors for jumping into movie musicals and being charmingly okay or just plain bad (see: Renée Zellweger in “Chicago,” Russell Crowe in “Les Misérables”). There’s a lot of leeway for great-try accolades, particularly if there’s dancing involved, or the movie is a comedy so the awkwardness and medium vocals work. But who goes straight from not singing to … opera? Confidence really will get you everywhere.

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And the most infuriating part is that Jolie is good. Like, almost-a-sure-thing-to-get-a-best-actress-nomination good. Her performance had a bunch of jet-lagged journalists applauding when her name rolled on the credits at a morning screening. At the news conference that afternoon, reporters acted more like fans, lining the walls and aisles. Two female journalists from different countries stood up to ask questions and told Jolie they cried multiple times watching the movie. One started crying just talking about how she cried. (Jolie also seemed to well up during the exchange, placing her hand on her heart and whispering, “Thank you.”)

Oscar buzz was always a given with this movie, the third in Larraín’s acclaimed trilogy of biopics of powerful women, starting with “Jackie,” then “Spencer.” And, so far, he’s two for two in getting best-actress nominations for his leading ladies: Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy and Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Coincidentally, when Portman lost in 2017, it was to Emma Stone, a non-singer who sang her heart out in “La La Land.” Take Larraín and add singing could be the winning formula!

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Seriously, one reporter from the Boston Herald told Jolie that the words “Oscar bait” have followed the movie ever since she was announced in the role. Had she brought her own supporting-actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted” to Venice “to maybe find a buddy next March for him”? (Jolie gracefully sidestepped the question by noting she was more concerned not “to disappoint” fans of Callas and opera.)

In the film’s opening, Larraín’s camera slowly moves through an opulent Parisian apartment until it stops on a somber scene that echoes the endings of the tragic operas Callas gravitated to throughout her career. A white sheet covers a figure lying still on the ground. The text on the screen tells us that is Sept. 16, 1977.

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Larraín – who grew up going to the opera house in his hometown of Santiago, Chile – and screenwriter Steven Knight have set the film in the final week of Callas’s life before her death at 53 from a heart attack, amid a dependency on Mandrax, more popularly known as Qualuudes. The film will eventually stream on Netflix, though a date has yet to be set.

“I would say, 90 percent of the opera that she sang ends with death on the stage,” Larraín said at the news conference. “So that’s something that Steve and I discussed extensively: How can we make a movie where the main character slowly becomes the sum of tragedies that she sang? And the angle was celebration. We didn’t want to make a dark movie about a tragic situation. It’s more like a movie where a woman spent her life singing for others, taking care of others, worried about her relationships, and now she’s ready to take care of herself and find her own destiny.”

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It was a time when Callas was living in reclusive splendor with her doting housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and fiercely protective butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), whose job includes endlessly moving her grand piano to whatever window she thinks has the best light and trying in vain to monitor the pill consumption he seems to know is killing her. (Ferruccio is still alive and has remained fiercely loyal, refusing to sell a memoir or tell stories about Callas to the press.)

But Jolie’s Callas doesn’t feel like someone who’s given up. She’s still swanning around in gorgeously tailored suits, with her huge mane of Greek curls and incredibly giant glasses (she had severe myopia and was nearly blind onstage), and, most important, trying to sing again, even though her last public outing several years prior was met with derision.

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Oh, and a TV reporter played by Kodi Smit-McPhee is following her around, as is the complicated love of her life, Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), for whom she left her husband two years before Onassis left her for none other than Jackie Kennedy. (Both are Mandrax-induced hallucinations.)

Jolie signed up to the film knowing she would actually have to learn how to sing opera. The way she jumped in, she said in the press notes, reminded her of younger actors and how they’ll always say “yes” when directors ask if they know how to ride a horse or wield nunchucks, and worry about figuring it out later.

“I was terribly nervous,” she said at the news conference. “I spent almost seven months training, because when you work with Pablo, you can’t do anything by half.” Larraín knew the actress could capture Callas’s magnetic presence and relate to the pressures the singer felt around her fame, but he strenuously did not want this to be a lip-syncing job. He planned on shooting close-ups of Jolie as Callas and felt it would immediately feel inauthentic to the audience if his lead actress didn’t know the sensation of singing opera, even if the sounds used in the film aren’t entirely her own.

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“To me, it’s the wrong path to take … where the actor is just trying to look right, get to the note and move the mouth in sync, etc., but they’ve never experienced it in the right way,” Larrain says in the film’s press notes.

Jolie worked on having the right posture, breathing and movement, and even learned Italian, as opera singers do to get the meaning and flow of the melody. She listened endlessly to tapes of Callas teaching others how to sing opera, which helped her nail her Mid-Atlantic accent and, moreover, understand how Callas would focus on technique and then bring in emotion. What we hear in the film are tracks mixing Jolie and Callas. The moments of Callas in her prime are mostly Callas with a fragment of Jolie – and then at other, more raw points, particularly as her voice degrades, it’s more Jolie.

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The first time she sang, Jolie said at the news conference, “I remember being so nervous. My sons were there, and they helped us lock the door, [make sure] that nobody else was coming in, and I was shaky.”

And it’s not just singing that Jolie had to do, but also singing in front of people, on huge stages and in front of dozens of extras and who knows what kind of onlookers on the streets of Paris. But she grew bolder. “Pablo, in his decency, started me in a small room and ended me in ‘La Scala,’” she said. “So he gave me a time to grow. But I was frightened to live up to her, given that I had, you know, not sung in public.”

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She also had to embody Callas in her extraordinary everyday life. To get into character, she said, “I sat with her glasses on and her Greek hair and her robe, and thought of her alone in her kitchen with Bruna and Ferruccio and who that person was, and allowed that human to come forward.”

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“It’s also quite sad,” Jolie added. “When she passed, the last experience she had, she went out and she tried [singing again], and the critics were so cruel. They were so cruel to her, and she wasn’t not trying, and she wasn’t not great, but she was older and she wasn’t as good, and they were mean. And I don’t know if she passed knowing that she did her best and she was appreciated and loved. I think she may have died with a lot of loneliness and pain.”

Since her split with Brad Pitt in 2016, the pair have been mired in disputes over finances and custody. She alluded to the role being a welcome respite. “For me, to be very candid, it was the therapy I didn’t know I needed,” she said in the press notes. And when answering a reporter who asked how she related to Callas, she responded, “Well, there’s a lot I won’t say in this room.”

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The technical part of singing and playing Callas wasn’t the hard part; it was the emotion that opera requires. “I think when your life is full, when you’ve felt a certain level of despair, of pain, of love, at a certain point, there [are] only certain sounds that can match that feeling,” she said. “And to me, the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of opera, there’s nothing like it, … It is the only sound that would explain that pain.”

She never got into specifics, but her meaning was clear. “To be honest, I’ve needed to be home more with my family these last years,” she continued. “And in that time, I’ve become maybe more grateful to have the opportunity to just be an artist and play and be among all of you.”

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