Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is 75 this year. It’s the story of Norma Desmond, once a great star of silent films, living, when we meet her, in “a brooding Sunset castle” with her ex-husband Max, now her butler. Max writes fake letters from fans who no longer exist, so Norma can imagine herself a star. Norma watches her old films obsessively, imagines she will make a comeback in Salome, and loves a pet monkey, who she buries with the ceremony of a prince.
When her delusions are exposed by her young lover, Norma, a glittering narcissist, murders him. She was played by Gloria Swanson, also a great star of silent films: Sunset Boulevard was her Salome, her comeback. It is a cruel and brilliant film, and its reach is long. Norma is fictional, but her story created the idea that the average famous, incalculably gifted woman is insane. We all know that Hollywood does terrible things to its women: objectification at best, rape at worst. We talk less about how we diminish, and erase, their art, in which they are invited to collude.
I thought of Sunset Boulevard when I watched Maria, the new biopic about Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. It is, in many ways, a remake of Sunset Boulevard, and Jolie plays Norma, though I suspect she doesn’t know it. Norma yearned for the close-up and the scene where a lighting technician shines the beam on her is the best in the film. “Let’s get a good look at you,” he calls from his eyrie. He doesn’t mean it. The real inner woman is of no interest to Hollywood. She just reflects the light. Jolie loves the close-up too: she has internalised something.
Most films about famous female entertainers are variants on Sunset Boulevard. We have Sunset Boulevard starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (Judy), Sunset Boulevard starring Ana de Arnas as Marilyn Monroe (Blonde); Sunset Boulevard starring Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse (Back to Black); now we have Maria too, the latest gilded film to call the subject of its devotion mad. You might say that Garland, Monroe and Winehouse were all mad: all were addicted to drugs, and they died young. But madness wasn’t their defining characteristic, even if these films insist on it. Their industry treated them as things, first alive, now dead: as a young actress Monroe was invited to expose her breasts to studio executives and Garland, given drugs to make her work as a teenager, was not allowed to rest. It was the same for Winehouse.
Maria is a film about the best-selling classical singer in history, and the most important opera singer of the 20th century. This is not a controversial view, and it is not disputed. Callas lost her voice early for a singer — we’re not sure why — and she had a relationship with the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis — we’re also not sure why — who later married Jackie Kennedy. Neither of these facts, though unfortunate, can erase Callas’s contribution to music. Unless you are her cinematic biographer, that is.
Like Sunset Boulevard, Maria opens with a death bed: her own. It is 1977, and Callas is 53, or she was. She is lying on the floor of her exquisite Paris apartment, dead as newsprint. Then we travel backwards in time to the previous week. Maria, tended by servants who act as parents, is broken. She has lost her voice and her lover, the tiny Onassis. She is addicted to Mandrax, which she hides from the servants, and she feeds her meals to the dogs. This is the material of the obsessed but unseeing biographer. It is not Callas. They just use her name, as if for branding.
Sophia Lambton, classical music critic and author of The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, tells me this is fiction. Callas listened to her records all her life: Maria says she feared them. She did not call her records perfect. She was not reclusive. Onassis did not hate opera or try to thwart her career: and she left him, not he her. She suffered from low blood pressure and died of a heart attack, but she was not a drug addict.
The real Callas was made happy by music, but Maria is not interested in music. The result, of course, is lifeless, and Jolie plays Callas as a poised corpse. Craving profundity in every shot, Maria lands on South Park with better clothes. With an already-dead heroine, the only real drama is: where to put the grand piano? By the end everyone is so emotionally cauterised, only the dogs are capable of a response. The credits thank Cartier: perhaps that was the point of it all.
Maria insists Callas was cursed. Judy (2019), another retelling of Sunset Boulevard with Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland / Norma Desmond, does the same: again, it begins at the ending, a place without hope. It is set in 1969, the year of her death, when she was gravely ill. If you hoped this film might be an homage to Garland’s contribution to music — to her fleeting joy, and the joy she gave — you are wrong. There is no music, just sickness, as if that were Garland’s only legacy. Yet watch her dance with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade and outdance him! Garland’s voice does not appear in Judy. Zellweger sang for her, as Marisa Abela sang for Amy Winehouse in Back to Black (2024), and she won the Oscar denied to Garland in her lifetime. Garland thought Hollywood hated her. Whether it knew it or not, she was right.
Perhaps the most vicious retelling of Sunset Boulevard is Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). It is from a Joyce Carol Oates novel that seethes with envy, and it dealt with Marilyn Monroe. There is a scene where Monroe’s soon-to-be-aborted son begs to live — this scene is set in her vagina, while, elsewhere, his useless mother, who was really an autodidact and the greatest comic actress in film, chokes on JFK’s cock. Monroe is reduced to loveless acts in pursuit of a father who will not return. Blonde is framed as a search for the father, and, in such quests, the heroine is turned again into a child, though, in Monroe’s case, an obscene one: a child who cannot even be a child, though in reality she could steal a scene from Jack Lemmon. Some sick child.
But this is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder’s, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema’s most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.
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SubscribeHollywood abuses its female actors but it also relies on their narcissism. Firstly to accept the Weinstein Faustian pact and then to accept roles abusing former stars. Jolie could have retired quietly with her millions. She chose however to play an icon whose talent dwarfed her own.
Maria Callas’ instinct for publicity and poise exceeded her good but not perfect bel canto voice. By the time she coupled with Onasis her voice was on the way out. Now we have all the science – voice – coaches etc i think voices last longer. So her timing was good. IMO the best person to play Callas would probably be Diamanda Galás – i think she is committed to both her art and her humanism and has amazing pipes. Maybe something in the east Mediterranean gene pool? I very much doubt La Jolie is committed to anything beyond her own image and bank balance. I realise this is anti hollyweird and anti nepotism bias showing through so if Jolie is a decent sort i apologise – but would be happy to bet my initial view is right.
Isn’t this the real motive behind these extended put downs? Female envy. Who goes to see them, men or women?
btw – let’s be real about the actual talent and intelligence possessed by Monroe.
Some films maybe a labour of love but they are soon corrupted by the men in suits to get bums on seats. But in a world of streaming and multiple platforms, audiences are dwindling and storytelling is dying. The industry is facing its own Sunset Boulevard.
Can’t quite decide whether I should go and see “Maria”. Still recalling the shock on hearing the Angelina Jolie would be playing Maria Callas. I’d be quite interested to have heard Callas’ views on Jolie.
Getting the sense that there’s just too much fake history to make it worth watching. That it will try to take something complex and replace it with a simplistic narrative. There’s more than enough original source material about Maria Callas out there for anyone genuinely interested – an excellent new BBC program called “Maria Callas: The Final Act” and “The Callas Conversations” with Lord Harewood. Go for the original – not the dumbed down Hollywood version.
Given the director’s back catalogue, this is as much a Pablo Larrain movie as a Callas ‘biopic’. He has a distinct style, trying to find the soul of iconic women. On the other hand, El Conde, his film about Pinochet, was superb black comedy.
What a wonderful piece of writing! Brava!
I appreciate this. I also wonder what it is in us female viewers of these films that keeps us coming back for this story? Because surely we as consumers play a role in shaping and maintaining this narrative? Is it a kind of existential masochism? Is it our envy of accomplished women that leads us to enjoy their “debunking” to justify ourselves in our own torpid avoidance of risk and lack of courage to stick out?
Interesting points!
Oh dear. I have seen the film and mostly enjoyed it. Probably because you spend a lot time listening to Callas sing and gazing at Jolie’s face, both of which are mesmerisingly beautiful. It is not a biopic, if you don’t know much about her life you will still need to Google it afterwards. The film is an entertainment and a pleasant way to spend a very cold afternoon.
This is not the movie I saw. The movie I saw was highly empathetic to Callas’ genius and her efforts to reclaim her art at great personal cost. In its flashbacks Callas is shown as commanding in her relationships with the most powerful men on the planet. The music throughout is resplendent. This review says more about the author’s personal grievances than Angelina Jolie’s brilliant performance.
“commanding in her relationships with the most powerful men on the planet”
It’s seems like a common feature of post feminist “modern” women, that they see life as a d**k measuring contest with “powerful men”, while being contemptuous and ignorant of the struggles of ordinary men.
That is so true – not to mention the psychosis in so much current entertainment of women physically beating the crap out of men twice their size. I mention how Jolie/Callas dominates the men in the movie only to refute the author’s portrayal of her as victimized.
Absolutely Right. Why do women (like the author) hate other prettier, more talented and more successful women so much.
The author loves creating victims. These stars enjoyed money, luxury, and many privileges. Nobody victimized them. Most women would kill to be in their place and have their game. Callas was a demanding diva, and you got it wrong. Onassis dumped her to get married. Bias of a fanatic woke feminist patriarchy hater. Boring!
Feminist writers only seem to be capable of viewing anything through a lense of fanatical female victimhood.
Biopics of famous men are usually equally critical, the recent Elvis film being a good example. What lunacy is it that drives feminists to see any depiction of women as uniquely sexist.
Interesting article, however, Sunset Boulevard is not a film just about female victimisation. Yes, Norma Desmond is a pathetic character, but she is not the only one. Joe Gillis,the writer, drawn to her and the glamour she stands for, ends up disillusioned and dead. He is equally important. Max, the subordinated, dismissed husband is a similar, supporting character. Feminists like to see the world or market, as a wonderful place, from which women are deprived because of patriarchal greed. The remedy for this is sexual equality with the same roles open to both men and women. But what is going on in Sunset Boulevard is of an older, different order. It derives very much from the story of Adam and Eve: Norma has taken the apple of Hollywood glory, and Joe becomes complicit in following her, though slightly reluctant, as was Adam. Feminists hate the Eve story, of course, even though it might be said that Eve was the first feminist, seeking to better her natural abilities. The result of this is not positive, as expected, but the loss of Paradise, for both Adam and herself. At the end of the film, Hollywood isn’t paradise either, but a sordid place where, despite hard work and sacrifice, as in life, no one gets out alive. The other films mentioned are more contrived to fit the feminine victim idea, and full of dreadful consequences, but Sunset Boulevard sees life holistically, not through a lens of single prejudice.
A lot of good points in this. Especially the tendency for modern films to be dumbed down, to emphasise form and style over substance, and to try to place historical, real geniuses into modern tropes.