In “Maria,” a sad, nosy, seedy film in which Maria Callas dies once again, banalities appear dressed as aphorisms. “Happiness never produced a beautiful melody,” she tells Mandrax, her journalist-cum-hallucinogen. When her obliging footman Ferruccio asks what she has taken—the film obsesses about Callas’s pills—she floats back a response: “I took liberties all my life. And the world took liberties with me.” At one point, in conversation with her accompanist, she tells him: “Blackbirds have a song that if you buy a recording, on the label it just says, ‘Blackbird Song.’” There’s a pause. “There must be a song which is just called ‘Human Song.’” Another pause. “I would like to sing it before I stop.” In searching for La Divina, the writers of “Maria” took a wrong turn and ended up at the tweets of Jaden Smith.
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