'Maria' review: Angelina Jolie hits all the right notes as Maria Callas

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Angelina Jolie plays the renowned opera singer Maria Callas in this biopic, which like the other similar films from its director, Pablo Larraín, tells this enormously impactful person's story through the prism of a fixed moment in her life. 

"Jackie" focuses on Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband's assassination. "Spencer" follows Princess Diana at a turning point: Christmas 1991, with her marriage to Prince Charles falling apart.

"Maria" shows a 53-year-old Callas during the last week of her life in 1977. Desperately lonely and sickened, she traverses her ornate Paris apartment and wanders the streets of the city, holding conversations with an imaginary documentary crew, hearing music everywhere and remembering all that came before.

MY SAY Larraín's method for operating in this space will be familiar to anyone who has seen "Jackie" or "Spencer." He does not strive for convention or accessibility, but to make movies in which the shape and the texture of the project mirrors something fundamental about the subject.

In the case of "Maria," he does this by staging what might best be understood as an opera inside Callas' head. By this time, the soprano has not performed for a number of years. Her voice does not carry the enormous power and depth it once did. Her longtime relationship with Aristotle Onassis, the most essential one in her life, has come to an end as he's married the widowed Jackie Kennedy (these Larraín movies have a lot in common). She has two devoted employees and apparently little else.

But oh, the memories: legendary performances at the most famous opera houses; the "exultation," as she puts it, of being on stage. The thrill of being celebrated and adored, including at that first meeting with Onassis, at a party in her honor.

To live as Callas even at the end, the movie says, was to live within a world of music. It meant a walk along the Trocadero in Paris could transform into a choir's performance of the "Anvil Chorus" from Giuseppe Verdi's "Il Trovatore." It meant that even as all else seemed lost, as the glorious years seemed but a fading and distant shadow, the aria remained.

In Jolie, Larraín finds the perfect Callas for this vision. She understands how to infuse benign gestures and movements with significance, to capture the magnitude of a lifetime in a steady turn, or a fixed stare. She brings a sense of the operatic and the otherworldly into a movie that contains her character into the earthly prison of her final days. The performance becomes even more noteworthy when you consider that Jolie does a share of her own singing — the film mixes her vocals with the real Callas'.

The movie can be opaque. It's often hard to grasp. There's no clear sense of why Larraín felt compelled to tell this story or what he intends for his audience to take away from it. It seems likely to frustrate as many audience members as it moves. But it's hard to shake.

BOTTOM LINE Jolie makes the movie worthwhile.