Helga without the H

Almost every year I attempt (with varying degrees of success) to watch as many Oscar nominees as possible before the ceremony. I post half-assed reviews here on my blog, and then at the end I write up some sort of silly analysis, predictions, reactions, etc. The quantity and quality depends entirely on how much time and energy I have each year, and I’m not gonna lie, this year’s already starting pretty dang rough! But let’s see how it goes. Today we turn to:

Maria

[1 nomination for best cinematography]

It’s pretty early in the process for me to be watching/reviewing films with a single nomination. But I had some time yesterday when I could put a movie on while I was working on other stuff, and I didn’t want to pick any of the heavy-hitters since I suspected split attention. I assumed Maria’s nomination was for best actress (Angelina Jolie) which I consider one of the major categories, so I threw it on. Turns out it’s actually nominated for cinematography, and Jolie’s lack of nomination is considered one of the biggest snubs of the year. Doh! This is a shame, because I absolutely adore Angelina Jolie (I even named my 1st car “Angie” in her honor), and she did a great job here as always. Oh well.

I’m glad I checked the nominations early in the film, because it allowed me to pay more attention to the cinematography. This film was beautifully shot, and it’s a well-deserved nomination. They did a great job capturing a 60’s postcard vibe, particularly in the scenes where our protagonist Maria Callas is losing her marbles. She’s hallucinating and wandering through a strange ethereal world, reflecting on her life through this teal-and-gold lens. It’s good stuff. We also have great flashback scenes set to look like grainy 60’s home videos. And in the present day, when we view the world though the eyes of her staff and the real world instead of through Maria, we see sad, cold opulence. So well done there.

Overall, I am going back and forth between really liking and really disliking the film. It’s not strong enough to make me feel emotions, so there’s no love or hate. At times I felt like I was really getting pulled into a mood, like I was in an opera. At other times the whole thing seemed pretentious or silly. And overall it was kinda boring. I don’t know how to feel.

One issue is that I have never heard of Maria Calla before. And I know jack shit about opera. This film had me googling Maria Calla, so it did the job of getting me interested in the subject matter. On the other hand, the film told us very very little about her. Everything was alluded to in a way that made me feel like I was supposed to already know about it. There were constant references to a “brute” in her past. Ok but… why is he a brute? We barely ever see him. We get no sense of why she was into this guy (she didn’t seem into him at all) or why he’s a brute. We were held at arm’s length of all the characters and story, reacting to something we know nothing about. As an uneducated opera virgin, I found this frustrating. I had a similar feeling about last year’s token Musical Biopic Maestro.

I am very very curious to hear how opera fans feel about this film. Fun tangent! I just tried to google to find opera fan reviews of the film, and this popped up:

“Ethereal” makes sense because I just googled the word to confirm that I was using it correctly earlier in this review. But what does Calvin and Hobbes have to do with opera? And now I’m googling “Andy Dalton” who I’ve never heard of before, and… turns out he’s an American football player? Whaaat?

Anyway, I clicked around the Opera subreddit for a while before getting bored and not learning much. Mixed opinions over there. Supposedly Jolie worked crazy hard training her voice to sing the opera bits, and then they electronically blended her voice with recording of Callas. What I’m most curious about it- did they nail it? I can’t tell, because I’m a rube. I was a voice expert to tell me whether Jolie’s singing was close enough to Callas’, and whether the blending was obvious to a trained ear. The good news is that Jolie is playing Callas in her final days when her voice was too shot to be pro-level (why is her voice gone? we don’t know! they don’t tell us!), so it’s fine if the actress isn’t as good at singing as one of the best singers of all time. But did she get close enough? Anybody?

Final note: this movie definitely reminded me of the film Judy, for which Renee Zellweger won the Oscar for best actress. It was easily one of the absolute best performances I’ve ever seen by any actor in my entire life. Zellweger nailed the Garland voice and mannerisms perfectly. It felt like Jolie was aiming for a similar thing here. But while I’m not familiar with Callas like I am with Garland, I can still say that this performance just wasn’t the same. Jolie did fine, but she was almost too sterile and one note (ha!). So while I love her and appreciated her performance, I can understand the snub. At least for now… we’ll see what I think when I see the rest of the best actress films.