It spoils none of the charm of Florence Foster Jenkins to say that Meryl Streep, as Jenkins, has a line near the end of the film that many viewers will remember long after they leave the theatre. Though it occurs in one of the film’s few purely dramatic, emotionally raw scenes, it would in any other context be a very funny joke—but the line and Streep’s delivery of it linger because they are emblematic of the exquisite balance that makes the film and her performance such a triumph.
Fans of the actor and of Stephen Frears—the quintessential actor’s director who has evoked notably complex and award-winning performances from other major actors (Judi Dench in Philomena and Helen Mirren in The Queen)—have eagerly awaited, since the project was announced more than a year ago, the opportunity of seeing just how this expert team would rise to the bizarre challenge of portraying this real-life figure who was a patron of the arts in New York in the first half of the 20th Century and who mistakenly fancied herself a singer. Though she infamously was not, her great wealth and the devoted machinations of her husband-manager St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) went a long way toward bolstering and protecting her delusion. The film focuses on the penultimate moment of her life and “career” at which Madame Florence bought her way in 1944 into Carnegie Hall and performed a concert that became the stuff of legend. Though she lacked any appreciable vocal instrument, range, color, pacing, rhythm, dramatic ability, or grasp of text, Jenkins became famous because she committed to her love of music with the panache and soulfulness of a gifted and highly trained diva. Her society concerts sold out immediately, as did her few recordings, and she was as good-hearted as she was delusional: many hundreds of the Carnegie concert tickets were gifted to servicemen and a large percentage of every ticket price went to wartime charities.
Screenwriter Nicholas Martin’s script takes a different tone from Marguerite, Xavier Giannoli’s recent Cesar-winning film which was also inspired by Jenkins’ life and music but which delves into some of the edgier aspects of the legend and more questionable motives of those who manipulated it. Martin, Frears, and Streep—without sanitizing or distorting—choose to focus on Florence’s confidence and the rarefied, almost hermetically sealed world that St Clair works constantly to sustain.
Not unlike Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2007), in which Streep so winningly played chef Julia Child and Stanley Tucci so ably partnered as her husband Paul, Florence is not exclusive in focusing on its eponymous subject but is quite essentially a celebration of marriage, of any committed coupledom. With that grace we all remember (and in recent years may have thought misplaced), Grant deftly seizes the plum role of Madame Florence’s husband and enabler. He covertly pays off critics and makes sure her recitals are packed with only sympathetic patrons. That he has a longtime mistress (Rebecca Ferguson) is nothing more than one “understood” fact in what seems a genuinely happy marriage based on shared values and shared devotion. When St. Clair—or “Whitey”, to use Florence’s affectionate name for him—tells her new accompanist, “Ours is a happy world”, and when he later says, “For twenty-five years I have kept the mockers and scoffers at bay”, it is the unvarnished truth. A charming gentleman who tried acting but was defeated by his indifferent ability, he of course knows where his bread is buttered, and though he may frequently experience discomfort in his role as chief aider, abettor, and interference-runner, Grant is brilliant at bringing to life Whitey’s real love for Florence and their marriage, his reverence for her and for what they are together. In his eyes Florence is no joke, and he has made it his life’s work to see that as many people as possible look through a similar lens.
Simon Helberg (who will be familiar to some viewers from CBS’s long-running Big Bang Theory) is so beautifully cast as Florence’s pianist Cosmé McMoon that he seems inevitable to the texture and pitch of the film. Puckish in stature, Moon brims over with his own devotion to music. Pale, large-eyed, and sweetly intense, he is just looking for a regular paycheck when he auditions for a job as Madame Florence’s accompanist, thinking she is a creditable singer. The facial reactions that eclipse Helberg’s concentration when he hears her first glass-shattering notes sets us up for the rest of a delectable performance—in which the callow musician learns many life-lessons about relationships, passion, and careers, and for which it seems likely the young actor will win some award nominations.
It’s exciting to watch Streep take on a society matron whose only claim to fame as a theatrical legend was as a sublimely unaware travesty and she proves beyond any question the old axiom that only a very good singer can convincingly portray a very bad singer. However, aided by Martin’s script and Frears’ astute, delicate direction, this relentlessly questing actor has also found the courage in the pathos and the redeeming love and passion in the ludicrous delusion. Without sacrificing any of the hilarity inherent in the tone-deaf hubris Florence manages to lift Jenkins from writhing in her long-held position as a damning footnote in musical history to at least a more rounded consideration, a slightly more accommodating perch in the pantheon of our shared comedie humaine. It does so with shrewdness, skill, balance, and a wonderful tenderness. Streep’s Jenkins is not her single most stunning performance and the film is not her most powerful vehicle—though they make for a charming and deeply satisfying entertainment—but it is the high-risk project which, in retrospect, may likely be remembered to have vaulted her once and for all over the top.
Years ago, when she was first considered potentially to have a place among the finest actors in film, Streep might have chosen to curate carefully her nest of reputation. Instead, she used her status to forge onward and outward, seeking roles that would force growth in the fierce intelligence, valiant versatility, and capacious humanity of her work. The past decade alone in her choices is breathtaking. The vivid and varied creations that run-up to this film include but are not limited to the droll, impassioned 6’2” chef of Julie & Julia who made French cuisine more accessible for American cooks, a feckless and only modestly talented middle-aged rocker in Ricki and the Flash, the fearless lead in the operatically opened-up film version of a wildly popular stage musical featuring one of pop music’s most eidetic songbooks (Mamma Mia! , 2008), a British prime minister both revered and reviled and facing out her latter days in the clutches of dementia (The Iron Lady, 2011), a strong but fearful, morally compromised Catholic nun in Doubt (2008), a cold businesswoman giving as good as she’s gotten in the cutthroat world of fashion (The Devil Wears Prada, 2006), a mid-life heroine coping with change in an adult romantic comedy in It’s Complicated (2009), and a yearningly maternal witch in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (2014).
Streep has always been noted (and by her few detractors criticized) for the cerebration and technique of her work, so it is an ironic bonus achievement that it has become progressively evident in her performances that the most salient aspect of her talent is its heart. She accepts in its seamless entirety the foolishness of Madame Florence’s dream, and when she states that “music has been, and is, my life,” we don’t question it for a moment. As is true of our most enduring artists, Streep’s humanity has a thirst that absorbs voraciously in order to render with specificity—and she never condescends.
When we consider the four decades of her work she has unarguably become the greatest film actor in the 120-year history of the medium.
– Hadley Hury
Another perfect review.