Nosh 134: 'Maria by Callas,' 'Green Book' & More

David Elliott

    

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

             

APPETIZER: Reviews of Maria by Callas and Green Book

    

Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words
Or should that be “in her own notes”? Of course, her immortal composers were Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Donizetti, Bizet etc. But the voice was Maria Callas, one of the great opera names in our increasingly crass world. Opera buff and French photographer Tom Volf’s tribute is a fan’s scrapbook, using clips, letters, home movies, diaries, interviews, memoirs and five complete arias.

The triumph here goes beyond musical passages caught on film (some are poignantly without direct sound, the recorded singing poured over flickering images). It is also in seeing La Callas the perfectionist remain Maria the woman. The New York-born teen was pressed into ruthless training by her Greek mother. At first pudgy, she became a willowy beauty (yet with a famously big nose). There is a tender tiny bit, post-performance, when Maria passes a flower girl and reaches out to fondly lift her chin – the kid has a long nose.

She was loved for truly acting her roles, with urgently expressive power (and, this being opera, some ham). Becoming a diva made her act offstage, too. Speaking French fluently (not much Italian beyond opera), she put a toity British glazing on her English in Europe. But listen to the New Yawk tones bursting out, when she confronts the swarming Chicago press: “I cannot do those lousy performances!” As her fat, avuncular husband became a grasping manager, Maria was shedding weight to look like Audrey Hepburn (an international female tendency of the era). She fell very hard for Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, writing of him like a Homeric god: “There was Aristo, contemplating the dark sea.” Ari, passionate but not very aristo, later turned his sun-baked charisma to newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Jackie flickers by, for in this movie Callas is the only star. Other celebs are mere sparklers.

She could be difficult and had famous, abrupt cancellations, the worst in Rome. Nerves and temper frayed long before the voice aged (she was savvy about her adoring, late-career fan base: “They were probably applauding what they hoped to hear”). Callas wrote plaintively to Onassis, “I am shy and rather strange,” yet we often observe a proud but  vulnerable character, never intellectual (few singers are) but rich in thoughtful feeling. And her soul sang. Never was she more beautiful than in a televised concert singing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Her arms enfold her red-gowned torso as if to embrace and channel the gorgeous sound. One hand’s long, slender fingers spread over her heart. Even a deaf person, watching, must feel her art.   

Green Book

The lessons of the civil rights movement (epic phase: 1954 to ’68) remain very relevant. Few have arrived with the entertainment kick of Green Book. The reality-based movie depicts the working relation and then friendship of black pianist Don Shirley and white employee Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (not to be confused with Jose de Vilallonga, the Brazilian smoothie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s). It is Tiffany’s time, early 1960s, and suave conservatory grad “Doctor” Shirley hires Copacabana club bouncer Tony as chauffeur and bodyguard. Their tour from New York into the explicitly racist Deep South impresses rich whites with Don’s special style, a kind of virtuoso cocktail-classical. His command of jazzy standards, show tunes and Chopin riffs gains more power as Don finds his inner soul brother, with unexpected help from the also evolving goomba Tony.

At the core is a counterpoint. Don Shirley is played dapper and “dicty” (a black term of the era, for pretentiously fancy Negroes) by lean Mahershala Ali. As Ali slowly reveals the inner yearnings of the lonely elitist, Viggo Mortensen’s Tony has the best Yankee slob’s Old South time since Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. The tour is a softer, but not toothless, variant on the risky Jim Crow-era travels of Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Mortensen, here bulked into a meat slab both amiable and menacing, fortunately does not repeat his fabled nude scene in 2007’s Eastern Promises. Partly written by Tony’s now almost elderly son Nick, this film advances director Peter Farrelly past minor tankers like The Three Stooges and Dumb and Dumber To. There are crackling lines and mean crackers, and sharp work from Linda Cardellini as Lip’s back-home wife and Dmitri Marinov (a former concert violinist) as the cellist in Don’s trio.

Here is the time when blacks used the Negro Motorists Green Book to find cheap (but safely welcoming) motels, and the rich stream of period tunes is not just a Dick Clark platter party. Visit You Tube’s video “The Times and Trials of Donald Walbridge Shirley,” and you realize some of his lippy flamboyance has been ironed out (partly to cover a plot surprise). But he and Tony make a terrific, even poignant duo. And one must relish any movie that salutes both Little Richard and the original KFC.

  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Racism in 1941 Hollywood was the key reason Orson Welles’s Latin American solidarity film It’s All True was derailed by RKO and chief instigator (and RKO investor) Nelson Rockefeller. They feared “that Welles had gotten dangerously off-track. His Rio movie was lionizing the working class jangadeiros (fishermen) and the Afro-Brazilians of the favelas (slums). The studio cut funds and stopped sending raw stock.” Welles, soon after returning, was fired. Evidently these mentors simply overlooked Orson’s famous “voodoo” Macbeth and Native Son (and 23 blacks appeared in Citizen Kane). Welles took small, impish revenge in The Lady from Shanghai, where the odious snoop Grisby (Glenn Anders) uses Rockefeller’s flippant trademark “fella.” (Quote from Mary Jo McConway’s new book The Tango War.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The heart, soul and finest New York skyscraper of Fur is Nicole Kidman, as Diane Arbus: “Genaro Molina’s 1997 Oscars photo captured Nicole, lofty above Tom Cruise, her snow-fleshed beauty in a Galliano absinthe-green gown. It’s hard to square that image with the woman who once told reporter Lee Grant, ‘I was an usherette in Sydney. I cleaned toilets. I never think of how I look.’ Director Baz Luhrmann (during Moulin Rouge) saw how ‘she loved to be photographed. She could inhabit the space by making a heightened image and fill the set with emotional energy.’ Still, Kidman battled inhibition, and director Jonathan Glazer (Birth) detected ‘a very powerful inner life going on.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available through Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Diane (Nicole Kidman) removes her special blue dress in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Picturehouse 2006; director Steven Shainberg; photography by Bill Pope).

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