Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.
Typical. You wait forever for a movie about Florence Foster Jenkins, and then two come along at once. (The other, sort of, is the marvelous French film Marguerite, which had a small U.S. release in spring and is new on DVD and VOD.) It’s easy to see what drew multiple filmmakers to her: She’s a great story. Jenkins was a real person, a rich socialite and music lover who lived in New York in the early 20th century and enjoyed performing amateur operatics, except she was a terrible singer — always off-key, probably tone-deaf. She died in 1944, having given only one truly open-to-the-public performance, but recordings of her “singing” live on. Unfortunately.
Why FFJ is suddenly considered a great story today, why she is of 21st-century interest, are questions at least as intriguing as Florence Foster Jenkins the movie itself is. Is it down to the popularity of YouTube and American Idol, which can make anyone a star regardless of talent? Jenkins’ one public performance — at Carnegie Hall, of all places, in 1944 — was indeed a sellout, as we see in the film, though she died not long after. She was suffering from advanced, incurable syphilis, true, but it’s easy to see that her fatal heart attack might have been brought on by the scathing reviews by music critics that she could suddenly no longer avoid — reviews she had previously been protected from because critics were not allowed into her private performances. Are we fascinated by the differences between then and now, when negative reviews are embraced by some as evidence that hoity-toity intellectual critics are out of touch with the common man (or woman)? Or is awfulness timeless?
Unfortunately, it’s tough to find any genuine modern resonance in Florence Foster Jenkins. That isn’t necessarily a problem. Meryl Streep as FFJ, dowdied up in period costume and doddering around in apparently deliberate cluelessness about her lack of talent, is pretty amusing. And when FFJ sticks to the farce it starts out as, it works wonderfully, embracing a charming silliness that’s like something P.G. Wodehouse might have loved. Simon Helberg, from TV’s Big Bang Theory, actually steals the movie from Streep as Cosme McMoon — apparently that was his real name! — the piano player hired to accompany Jenkins’ ear-piercing singing who fears for his own reputation even as he is won over by her enthusiasm. One scene in which Jenkins and McMoon tinkle out a tune together on the piano is lovely, finding that just-right balance between silly and sentimental.
But the longer FFJ goes on, the more maudlin it gets. Hugh Grant as Jenkins’ husband, St Clair Bayfield, finds a sort of sneaky chill as a man who might be genuinely devoted to his wife, or might be indulging her for nefarious reasons of his own. But screenwriter Nicholas Martin — a TV writer making his feature debut — chooses to reveal a secret about Bayfield’s life apart from Jenkins that appears to solve the riddle in one direction while the overall depiction of their relationship goes in precisely the other direction. What had once been deliciously ambiguous is now tediously concrete, and in the least plausible way possible. It wants to sell us on a foundation of the Jenkins-Bayfield marriage that is not supported by the rest of the film.
This is a shame. Director Stephen Frears has made some great movies — Philomena and The Queen — based on true stories about real women that are startlingly good at finding a harmony between profound emotion and the preposterousness of the situations they find themselves in. I don’t know what happened here to make him lose his way, but his Florence Foster Jenkins is little more than a trifle — an enjoyable trifle — that does not linger any longer than Jenkins’ high notes.
