While the glamorous role of a declining opera diva would seem perfect for a star of Jolie's profile, it's undernourished by the screenplay's limited conception.

“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s cinematic portrait of opera legend Maria Callas, arrives as the third of the director’s films centered on iconic women of the 20th century.

Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas' short life in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” a dramatic, evocative elegy to the famed soprano. It’s an affair that’s at turns melancholy, biting and grandly theatrical, an aria for a once in a generation star.

Where the opera star Maria Callas differs from Princess Diana or First Lady Jackie Kennedy in Larraín's conception is that she desperately wants to be on (or return to) the public stage; her most authentic self is only complete with a loving audience.

The important thing to know going into “Maria” is that it’s the third in a trilogy of films directed by the Chilean whirlwind Pablo Larraín that seek to recover the women behind the plaster saints of 20th-century iconography.

The Callas of “Maria” has far more agency regarding her personal affairs. In a flashback scene (one of many in the film, mostly in B&W), she blows off a brazen proposition by U.S. President John F. Kennedy with a raised eyebrow and the chilly query, “Where’s Jackie?”