Review: 'Maria' disappoints and leaves us on the outside looking in

No list of the year's best performances would be complete without highlighting Angelina Jolie's insightful, indelible screen rendering of prima donna Maria Callas in Chilean director Pablo Larraín's "Maria," now in theaters before its Netflix streaming debut on Dec. 11.

Even those who don't know opera know the legend of Callas, the American-born Greek soprano, whose fierce talent and beauty electrified audiences. Except in flashbacks, that Callas is barely on view in a film that focuses on the last days of La Divina ("The Divine One"), her voice in shocking disrepair, before a heart attack silenced her in Paris in 1977 at the age of 53.

It's a gloomy business, light on the mischief the real Callas displayed in interviews, a few shown over the closing credits in stark contrast to the wounded spirit we've watched for two hours.

Larrain has a knack for catching glamorous, troubled women at a time of extreme personal crisis. In "Jackie," Natalie Portman embodied JFK's widow crafting her own future. In "Spencer," Kristen Stewart showed Princess Diana breaking away from the royal family that stifled her.

Portman and Stewart both won deserved Oscar nominations for their portrayals, and Jolie will surely follow suit. Yet why is this gorgeously mounted film about a livewire so strangely lifeless? The Callas we see here under the forensic gaze of Larrain and screenwriter Stephen Knight is the prototypical bird in a gilded cage, someone perceived as if under glass.

"Maria" opens with Callas lying dead near the grand piano in her Paris apartment as the film, in flashback, embalms her in myth. A framing device is introduced of Callas being interviewed at home by a fictional TV journalist named Mandrax ("Power of the Dog" Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee), also the name of the medication she uses to sedate her raw nerves.

As the camera prowls around the star's luxurious digs, we see Maria being cared for with protective compassion and unstinting loyalty by butler Ferruccio (Pier Francesco Favino) and housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). Favino and Rohrwacher are both deeply expressive at showing the love these two feel for their sharp-tongued, often tempestuous boss.

As Callas walks the streets of Paris, shot with autumnal beauty by the great Ed Lachman ("El Conde"), the memories kick in, stark black-and-white images of her unhappy Greek childhood as her mother used her to "entertain" WWII German officers. There's also the young Maria (Aggelina Papadopoulou) before success led her to diet down to fashion icon standards.

Mostly, there's the glorious voice, tackling such masters as Verdi, Puccini and Bellini on stages from La Scala to the Met. Jolie prepped rigorously for months to mime the posture and movements of an opera singer, her own thin voice blended with Maria's in her declining years. Practice makes perfect, maybe too perfect, except in those rare moments when Jolie lets us see the cracks in the Callas' armor and into the vulnerable human underneath.

In the end, Larrain's adoring tribute to Callas disappoints as a movie by staying too rigidly on the surface, though the surface looks stunning thanks to Jolie's beauty, Lachman's camera wizardry and the breathtaking costumes by designer Massimo Cantini Parrini.

Jolie, no stranger to tabloid infamy herself, is quite touching when her Greek tycoon lover Aristotle Onassis (Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer is a trollish dynamo) leaves her for Jackie Kennedy. Still, the real heartbreaker for Maria is when her voice deserts her.

Oddly, Jolie's expert lip-synching builds another layer of artifice between Maria and the audience. The emotional power that made Callas the leading actress among her opera peers remains frustratingly muffled. "Maria" is the least of Larrain's trio of biopics. It commits the cardinal sin that Callas never did as an artist by leaving us on the outside looking in.