Angelina Jolie

An hour into Maria (2024), a recording of Maria Callas in her prime plays over Angelina Jolie's face while she listens to it. She does nothing much. She does not weep or mouth along; she sits, and the gap between the voice on the record and the woman in the chair does the work. It is the best forty seconds in the film, and it tells you what Jolie is for. She can be looked at for a long time without asking for anything, and few actors can.

That has been true since the beginning, though the films have not always known it. After small parts in the early 1990s and television films such as George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), she broke through as Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted (1999), the performance critics still cite first when they argue for her as a dramatic actor. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) made her an action star, and Maleficent (2014) let her take a villain and turn her round. From 2011 she directed several war films. After Eternals (2021) she stepped away, and Maria was the return. The recurring complaint, and it is a fair one, is not that she is bad but that she is often bigger than the material, and the material has rarely been built to her size.

The two recent films we have reviewed bear that out. In Eternals, Chloé Zhao gives her Thena, a warrior whose mind slips so that she sometimes forgets Ma Dong-seok's Gilgamesh and comes at him with a blade. Their scenes in the Australian outback, a man in an apron and a woman who occasionally tries to kill him, moved us more than we expected, because Zhao lets them sit at a table and eat. The rest of the film stops every ten minutes to explain itself. Jolie is better than it, and so is Ma.

Maria is the same problem lit more beautifully. Pablo Larraín and Edward Lachman shoot her in brown and gold with the curtains half drawn, and Massimo Cantini Parrini's coats and dark glasses do half the acting for her. She lowers her voice, slows her walk, and is at her best in the small dry cruelties: a waiter corrected, a meal refused, a piano moved from one room to another because she has decided so. What she does not do, or is not asked to do, is crack. The singing is Callas's own recordings, and Jolie has said that "you can't pretend opera, and then I was scared"; the rehearsal scenes, where the voice is meant to fail, are where the fear shows and the performance is most alive. The flashbacks to the prime show the join.

She has now spent two films being kept at a distance by directors who plainly admire her. The next one to cast her should write a scene in which somebody says no to her, and see what happens.