Angelina Jolie dominates in an overly fatalistic drama

“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s drama about the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, begins on the day of her death, September 16, 1977. Thin as a ghost, wrapped in a white nightgown, she has collapsed on the living room floor of her very lavish Paris apartment. The film then flashes back to the week before; most of it takes place during that week (though it is peppered with key episodes from Callas’s life). So we know exactly where it’s going. But we don’t just know because the film takes place during that fateful final week. We know because the story “Maria” tells is one of a neurotic downward spiral.

The apartment, with its chandeliers hanging from high ceilings, its wooden walls and large old canvases, and the most luxurious bed I've ever seen in a film, is grand enough to evoke the court of an 18th-century French royal family. This is Larraín's third interior portrait of an iconic female figure of the 20th century, after “Jackie” (about Jacqueline Kennedy) and “Spencer” (about Princess Diana). In all three films, the residences feel momentous, like elaborate stage sets that act like gilded cages. Jackie Kennedy lived in the White House, of course. “Spencer” was set at Queen Elizabeth's country estate. But although the Maria Callas we see lives a life of luxury, her apartment, much more than the houses in the other films, feels like a prison of her own making.

Perhaps this is because her whole life has become a prison. Maria gets through the day by taking her “medicine,” a cocktail of stimulants and tranquilizers, most notably Mandrax, a hypnotic tranquilizer she acquires illegally. She doesn't eat much; we learn that she goes three or four days without eating, an eating disorder linked to her obsession with staying slim, in contrast to the “fat” girl she was as a child. Everything about Maria is compulsive. She treats the two people who have taken care of her for years – her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and her butler and chauffeur Feruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) – like vassals whose purpose in life is to indulge her whims. (Feruccio is a man with back problems, but she keeps ordering him to move the piano, for no good reason.) She avoids meetings with her doctor as if he were the devil. And night after night she fantasizes that she is haunted by the ghost of her former lover, Aristotle Onassis.

And then there's the matter of her voice. Maria is 53 and hasn't sung in public for four and a half years. Yet as the film presents her, she is an artist through and through, a woman driven and consumed by her gift of singing opera with a voice so sublime, so pure in its piercing majesty, that it reaches to the heavens. “Maria” is full of opera, especially by the 19th-century Italian composers (Verdi, Rossini, Puccini) that Callas highlighted in the repertoire. Every time an aria rings out on the soundtrack, we are swept away by the power of her gift. Jolie does an extraordinary job lip-synching the nuances of Maria's vocal splendor. And we can feel the singing haunting Maria, who can no longer listen to her old records; they are of a perfection that pains her. “The audience expects miracles,” she says with rueful awareness. “I can no longer perform miracles.” Her voice is far from gone, but it is now much weaker. The singing teacher and accompanist (Stephen Ashfield) she visits during the week tells her, after listening to her sing an aria: “That was Maria singing. I want to hear Callas!”

The myth of LaCallas — the voice that enraptured the world — is what Maria now holds captive. If she can't bring La Callas back, what's the point of living? One could say this story is as tragic as an opera: a great artist caught in the fading of her gift. But one could also say that this makes the Maria Callas of “Maria” less a great heroine striving for something real and more a doomed legend living on the back burner, like Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.”

The main characters in Jackie and Spencer faced hellish circumstances, but they were very different. Set in the week after JFK's assassination, Jackie was about Jackie Kennedy pulling herself together, knowing how important what was about to happen that week would be to history, and in doing so she became an example of courage. Spencer was about Diana facing the existential crisis of her arranged marriage and deciding to save herself by changing the nature of the modern monarchy. Both films were about a dark kind of triumph.

Maria bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín's ebullient empathy and cinematic gift. But in contrast, the film is marked by a dramatic fatalism that does it no favors. It is the first of these three films to feature a great artist, but Maria somehow seems a less important character than the heroines of Jackie or Spencer. Or at least there is a sense that there is less at stake.

Jolie's performance is quite good in many ways. She grabs our attention from the moment she appears on screen, playing Maria as a cunning woman who is domineering and mysterious, combining the vitality of a brilliant diva with the downcast emotional fire of a femme fatale. Jolie reminds us for the first time in years that she can be a deadly serious actress with impressive subtlety and power. Still, I wish Larraín and his screenwriter Steven Knight (“Jackie,” “Locke”) had found greater vulnerability in the at-the-end Maria.

Shot by the great Edward Lachman, Maria has an autumnal visual warmth that is both beautiful and seductive. The flashbacks are in black and white, coloring Maria's past, but in a way that leaves us with as many questions as answers. The same goes for her interviews with an eager young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) named, oddly enough, Mandrax. Her sour relationship with her mother is captured in scenes set during World War II (during which she, her mother and her sister had returned to Greece), in which young Maria is asked to sing for (and sleep with) German soldiers.

The most important flashbacks, however, revolve around Onassis, the fabled Greek shipping magnate she fell in love with in 1959. Haluk Bilginer plays him as a charismatic troll who describes himself as “ugly” but uses the power of his wealth in such a manipulative way that he somehow becomes…irresistible. Maria is captivated by his mystique but refuses to submit to his control; so the two never marry. (In fact, Onassis left Callas to marry Jackie Kennedy, a subject the film touches on in passing by introducing JFK as a character.)

There's a sense of doom hanging over “Maria.” Larraín raises the stakes in this way, but in a strange way he also lowers them again at the end. Maria Callas is so determined to control her fate that not even the audience's hopes—that she will somehow find a way to overcome her despondency—are allowed to disrupt her death spiral. We get many glimpses (captured on various footage) of Callas onstage, back in her heyday in the 1950s and '60s. But none of them are long enough to let us feel the sense of her art bringing the house down. At one point, Maria remarks that singing opera in her way is so demanding that it sucks the life out of you. In its way, it's a great idea, but by the end of “Maria,” you almost feel like it sucks the life out of the film.