‘Maria by Callas’ a Humanizing Portrait of a Diva

When Maria Callas dazzles an audience into silence with her undulating soprano, one might expect the heavens to part and for an angel to beckon her home. There is an otherworldliness to the legendary opera star, the subject of director Tom Volf’s documentary film. Just watch how thoroughly she enlivens dramas in languages that aren’t her own, as her dark eyes flash with emotion. Volf explores the central tension between the rather demure “Maria” and her monolithic persona as one of the 20th century’s most vaunted artists, whom she distinguishes as “Callas”: “I would like to be Maria, but there is the Callas that I have to live up to.” Callas was born and raised in New York and groomed for fame at an early age by her mother, who harbored her own artistic dreams. Throughout her illustrious career, Callas was as beloved as she was excoriated for not being perfect, for missteps that probably wouldn’t ensnare a man of the same stature.

Volf trains a largely uncritical eye on Callas’s life, and does not include perspectives other than Callas’s, aside from a few interviews within her trusty inner circle. Perhaps Volf neglects to investigate any of the spurious rumors that hounded Callas throughout her life because, like her, he doesn’t find them worth investigating. Such an oversight might read as a rhetorical maneuver to paint Callas unilaterally as a victim in her rarefied universe, although it does not detract from the film’s understated beauty.

As central as the idea of the original, unmasked “Maria” is to the title of the film and to her contrived “Callas,” Volf doesn’t explore her childhood aside from a hurried montage that is tediously factual rather than insightful. Other biographical sources have probed the dark underbelly of her glamorously steep rise to fame, and detail her parents’ infelicitous marriage. Callas herself has elsewhere spoken severely against her mother and how her micromanaging robbed her of a proper childhood and eroded her self esteem. Her voiceovers in this film then seem eerily scrubbed of emotion considering the events and interpersonal relationships that must have made for a toxic psychological cocktail and that shaped the course of her life. For someone as candid as Callas proves herself to be in the written correspondences and interviews that Volf stitches together, the film seems somewhat incomplete without that side of “Maria.”

Volf deftly curates Callas’s most revelatory off duty moments and ponderous side comments to portray her quiet dignity, so that “Maria” breaches the surface of “Callas” in beautifully simple and unexpected moments. Callas is panned as a high-maintenance diva after she cancels her highly anticipated performance at the Rome Opera, and later remembers the critical drubbing by the media as “my lynching.” With knowing sadness, she states, “I didn’t endanger the life of Italian lyric theater. I simply had bronchitis.” She isn’t precious about her image, resigning, “Time does heal lots of things and I’m sure time will prove what I am actually.” Her jaded wisdom and acceptance of the inexorable, preordained arc of her life manifest in her prayer to God: “Give me what you want. I have no choice,” she says, emphatically but ruefully, knowing how the world works. “You can never fight the public.”

Volf’s singular focus on Callas’s perspective proves effective in that he gives her the opportunity and space to speak for herself, so that each of her lines resonates with the finality of a printed word. Her scattered contemplations amount to profound revelations on the difficult contradictions of womanhood. Callas knows when and why men fail her, and speaks plainly on how glory ruined her marriages, likening it to a heady wine. When she’s severed from the Metropolitan Opera over creative disagreements with its director, she bristles at his claim that she is difficult to work with, and publicly retorts, “He’s a weak man.” Her championing of her rigorous artistic standards and personal choices against her discreditors almost becomes an act of political resistance: “I cannot do those — excuse me — lousy performances. That’s not art.”

Despite her evolving artistry, Callas espouses surprisingly traditional values. She considers family-making the natural vocation of a woman, but felt forced by her mother and her ex-husbands, and interestingly by a sense of destiny, to pursue her career as relentlessly as she has. Her compulsion to sustain “Callas” begs the timeworn question: Can women have it all? When asked if she’s a happy woman, she responds after a pause, “I don’t always realize it.” She finds herself guilty of performing an acceptable brand of femininity and of downplaying her intellectual self, making efforts to be seen as affable, with “simple tastes.” She’s also presciently aware of the limitations of “Callas” as a specifically female public figure and ruminates matter-of-factly on age pressure: “I’m a young woman, but not so young anymore.” In almost admitting to not having it all and even hinting at the impossibility of it given the brutalizing power of public opinion, there is something revolutionary about her honesty.

Despite her steely public persona, a childlike idealism tinges Callas’s words. When Barbara Walters quotes Callas back to her, “I wanted someone, Prince Charming, to take me away,” “Maria” emerges as her plainspoken and unabashedly romantic self to reflect on the primacy of love. She writes forlornly to Elvira de Hidalgo, her beloved teacher and longtime friend, “You know me, rather shy and strange. But you know how to love me as I am.” Volf is able to interlard the collectively embellished life story of “Callas” with her secret thoughts so meaningfully yet so enigmatically that one can see exactly how fascinating “Maria” is, and how deeply misunderstood.

—Staff writer Claire N. Park can be reached at claire.park@thecrimson.com.