Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)

IMDB Rating 7.0/10

  

The story of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress who dreamed of becoming an opera singer, despite having a terrible singing voice.

Director: Stephen Frears

Writer: Nicholas Martin

Stars: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg

PG-13 | 1h 51min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

IMDB link Here

MOVIE RATING ★★★★☆

  

All the right wrong notes

As Les Dawson proved with such precision, any fool can play the piano badly, but it takes real skill to play it brilliantly badly. Similarly, Morecambe and Wise knew that the perfect way to mangle “Grieg’s piano concerto by Grieg” was to play “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. Now, to the august list of superbly maladroit comedic musicians we may add Meryl Streep, who takes centre stage in this very likable, frequently hilarious, yet still poignant tragi-comedy from director Stephen Frears. Streep plays the titular songbird, a New York socialite and eager patron of the arts whose enthusiasm for a good tune is matched only by her inability to sing one. Not that it stops her from trying. Inspired by the “profound communion” of a performance by soprano Lily Pons, Madame Florence resumes her own singing lessons, her private recitals leading to 78rpm recordings and even an October 1944 concert at Carnegie Hall, which has since passed into legend.

The real Florence Foster Jenkins was one of those larger than life characters you just couldn’t make up. No wonder, then, that she has inspired numerous theatrical and cinematic productions. Preparing to play the “diva of din” on stage in Peter Quilter’s 2005 play Glorious!, Maureen Lipman called her story “one of triumph over embarrassment”, and insisted that one must “learn to sing well before you can sing badly”. Earlier this year, Catherine Frot won a best actress César for playing a fictionalised version of “the first lady of the sliding scale” in Marguerite, a film whose central character’s name, “Marguerite Dumont”, alludes to the longstanding comic foil of the Marx Brothers’ movies. Frears himself says that Jenkins “reminded me of Margaret Dumont… just preposterous, but touching at the same time”, an assessment that perfectly sums up both Streep’s performance and the overall tone of Frears’s film.

Working from a screenplay by Nicholas Martin, Florence Foster Jenkins stays fancifully faithful to true events, following Jenkins’s rehearsals with pianist Cosmé McMoon in the run-up to the big show, which will fulfil her lifelong ambition. As McMoon, The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg is perfectly cast, an accomplished pianist whose nervous laugh not only echoes Tom Hulce’s cackle in Amadeus, but also weirdly mirrors the shriek with which Streep hits a high C. Hugh Grant is on career-best form as Florence’s partner/manager St Clair Bayfield, a self-proclaimed “eminent actor and monologist” (he has performed Hamlet many times, although sadly “not as yet in the principal role”) whose recitals provide an appetiser to Jenkins’s own thrillingly bonkers tableaux vivants – winged set pieces mounted for the “Verdi Club”. For years, Bayfield has protected Florence from “the mockers and scoffers”, soothing her anxieties about the shortage of chives in her potato salad (“unconscionable I know, but they tell me there is a war on”), and ensuring that any criticism of her singing is couched in euphemism (“One word – authenticity!”). But when Carnegie Hall looms, so too does the spectre of the “hoodlum element”, not to mention the New York Post columnist Earl Wilson, superbly thumbnailed by Christian McKay.

Amid the joy, there are hints that Jenkins’s friends are only in it for the money. In one pointed exchange, David Haig’s ever-so-slightly slimy vocal coach Carlo Edwards conspiratorially tells Bayfield: “She spoils us all, doesn’t she?” But while the more formally adventurous Marguerite posited the absence of a husband’s love as central to its heroine’s madness, Frears’s film affords Grant’s silver fox an air of love and devotion to his “bunny”, even as his extracurricular “sport” takes him away from her. At times I found myself wiping away a tear, genuinely moved by their “very happy world”. More rigorous critics may sneer – I say “Bravo!”

Read full review at The Guardian

Singing So Wretched It’s Legendary

Meryl Streep will get most of the attention accorded the crowd-pleasing “Florence Foster Jenkins” thanks to a performance that may single-handedly set off a boom in the earplug industry. But the actor you should keep your eye on is Simon Helberg. It is his reactions to her vocal travesties that really make the movie sparkle.

Ms. Streep is a delight, hilarious when she’s singing and convincingly on edge at all times. She gives us a woman who is tethered to reality just enough to function, but divorced from it just enough to be clueless about her lack of musical ability.

The tale, though, wouldn’t be half as engaging without Mr. Helberg, who is familiar from television’s “Big Bang Theory.” He plays Florence’s pianist, Cosmé McMoon, who in this version of the story was just looking for a paycheck when he auditioned for a job as her accompanist, thinking she was an actual singer. Mr. Helberg’s reaction when he first hears her voice is by itself worth the price of admission. Cosmé, of course, realizes immediately how irredeemably terrible she is, and he soon fears for the effect that being associated with her might have on his own career.

Others — Tiny Tim, P. D. Q. Bach — have explored the comic possibilities of performing badly, but in this telling that wasn’t Jenkins’s intent. Instead, her story is a sort of harbinger of the YouTube age, when you never know what might go viral and are never quite sure whether it has done so because it’s impressive or because it’s wretched.

Mr. Frears doesn’t delve too deeply into human frailty, the lust for fame or the other darker themes suggested by Jenkins’s story (which has also inspired a play, “Souvenir,” and a recent French film, “Marguerite”). He’s content to let his three leads be eminently watchable in a midcentury New York beautifully conjured by his cinematographer, Danny Cohen, and his production designer, Alan MacDonald

Read full review at New york times

Meryl Streep plays a delusional diva with a uniquely awful voice in this tragicomic biopic from director Stephen Frears.  

A natural fit for stage and screen, Jenkins was a socialite and opera buff who became infamous for her bizarre, off-key, often unlistenable assaults on the works of Mozart, Verdi, Brahms and others. Her story has been dramatized several times before, notably in the Tony-nominated Broadway play Souvenir and the West End musical Glorious! A lightly fictionalized Jenkins also appeared in the 2015 French film Marguerite, which transplanted her story to 1920s Paris.

Frears and his screenwriter Nicholas Martin focus on events in 1944. Jenkins (Meryl Streep) shares an unorthodox long-term marriage to St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), a hammy English stage actor who serves as her devoted manager and official chaperone, even though he lives discreetly in a separate apartment with another woman, Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson).

Sporting a padded midriff and unflattering wig, Streep gives a characteristically robust performance as Jenkins, replicating her glass-shattering shrieks and clumsy stage gestures with meticulous attention to detail. That said, this is one of the veteran Oscar-winner's lighter star turns, all graceless clowning and Absolutely Fabulous mannerisms. The film’s real comic dynamo is Helberg, whose animated face telegraphs a constant churn of anxiety, disbelief and delight, often without resorting to words.

Crinkly and craggy as middle age encroaches, Grant seems to be channeling Roger Moore with his starchy performance. In fairness, he does imbue Bayfield with charm and compassion, and even attempts a sporting burst of jazz dancing. It may just be coincidence that he is playing a sworn enemy of the New York tabloids, echoing Grant’s real-life role as figurehead of Hacked Off, the U.K. campaign group seeking to curtail intrusive press behavior in the wake of the phone-hacking scandals. Tellingly, the only journalist who writes the brutal truth about Jenkins is depicted in the movie as a mean-spirited snob.

British TV veteran Martin’s first feature screenplay is a workmanlike affair full of jazz-age New York clichés and clunky exposition (“There’s Cole Porter! And Tallulah Bankhead!”). His jokes are light and sometimes labored, more reliant on face-pulling overreaction than sharp verbal wit. Jenkins suffered from syphilis for decades, which Martin fleetingly addresses, though he does not pursue recent theories that the disease may have affected her mental state and eccentric performance style.

With Liverpool and London standing in for 1940s Manhattan, the action mostly takes place in a succession of stagey interiors, giving this Franco-British production a televisual feel. Frears directs in perfunctory manner, polished but passionless, and low on visual verve. At times resembling one of Woody Allen’s minor autumnal efforts. Florence Foster Jenkins is a modestly enjoyable crowd-pleaser, but it ultimately feels smaller than its subject, a deeply conventional portrait of a highly unconventional woman.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

MOVIE RATING ★★★★☆

  

Florence Foster Jenkins is the perfect antidote for sobering times  

Stephen Frears’s new film is based on a true story, but one of the biggest compliments it can be paid is that you wouldn’t know it. Florence Foster Jenkins feels less like a biopic than a classic postwar studio comedy – a pillowy paean to silliness, and the perfect antidote for sobering times.

Frears turns Foster Jenkins’s story into an Emperor’s New Clothes fable in reverse, in which everyone clocks exactly what’s going on, but realises that shouting out would only spoil the fun. It follows Florence (Meryl Streep) in late middle age as she approaches that life-capping Carnegie Hall gig, chivvied along by St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), a modestly talented actor and her doting second husband.

Streep plays Florence as a seamless hybrid of dumpy arts-scene doyenne and excited schoolgirl: when she performs, she draws her elbows in close to her chest and occasionally twists very slightly from side to side, like the primary-school choirgirl who finally gets her moment in the spotlight.

And it’s pure Streep Soufflé – free from the weighty responsibility to imitate (as in The Iron Lady) or emote the house down (as in August: Osage County), she gives her most human performance since Nancy Meyers’s 2009 romantic comedy It’s Complicated, full of warmth that gives way to heart-pinching pathos.

But Florence isn’t the film’s centre of gravity. That duty falls to St Clair, who treats her with a kind of grandfatherly affection, while shielding her from the odd sling or arrow that makes it over the ramparts. For those of us who felt Grant was born half a century too late for the career he deserved, Florence Foster Jenkins will come as partial vindication.

Florence’s rehearsal scenes have a gently escalating ludicrousness about them that’s totally winning, and a sequence in which she ends up being grabbed from behind by her vocal coach (David Haig) and all but ridden into tune is a snort-inducing comic vignette.

A visual gag involving potato salad and a line about antique chairs both smack of Preston Sturges at his loopiest, but both are grounded in truth. The script, by former TV writer Nicholas Martin, never quite gets up to screwball speed, but it knows an anecdote worth borrowing when it hears one.

The tone here is very different from Xavier Giannoli’s Marguerite – another recent film inspired by Jenkins’ life and music – which initially sided with the sniggering onlookers before finding unexpected transcendence in a third-act handbrake turn. Here, the film ushers you into Florence’s confidence and her snowglobe-like “happy world” that St Clair works so hard to keep from cracking.

File it alongside The Queen and Philomena as the final chapter in Frears’s unofficial Strong Women trilogy: a delicious, finger-tingling comedy about the creative instinct that makes your heart want to squawk with joy.

Read full review at The Telegraph

MOVIE RATING ★★★★

 Meryl Streep floats in bubble of self-delight as dreadful opera singer

This is the second film this year inspired by the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, the American heiress whose famously dreadful operatic recitals earned her a cult following including Cole Porter.

As it turns out, there's a lot of dramatic mileage in the premise of a dedicated artist oblivious to her total lack of talent.

Xavier Giannoli's Marguerite is very good, but Stephen Frears' more broadly comic variation on the theme is even better. Both films combine absurdity and pathos, albeit in quite different ways: where Catherine Frot as Giannoli's heroine hinted at anxiety and frailty, Meryl Streep as Florence seems to float in a bubble of self-delight.

An old hand skilled at adapting to changing times, Frears has scored his biggest recent successes with vehicles for veteran stars such as Helen Mirren (The Queen) and Judi Dench (Philomena). Florence Foster Jenkins fits this pattern, showcasing a typically rich, witty Streep performance that combines the plumminess of her Julia Child in Julia and Julia with the bewilderment of her country singer in A Prairie Home Companion.

In practice, though, this is a three-hander rather than a solo turn. As Florence's fey accompanist Cosme McMoon, Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory, is tasked with representing the audience's point of view, allowing him to show off his musical versatility and his flair for squirming embarrassment.

The most valuable player of all is Hugh Grant, who has his best role in years as Florence's dodgy yet devoted husband St Clair Bayfield: while Florence remains blissfully embroiled in her illusions, it's up to St Clair to keep things humming behind the scenes. As ever, Grant knows how to make it look as if he's barely trying – but as a light comic leading man in the polished British manner of Rex Harrison or George Sanders, there are few living actors who can match his finesse.

The film which Florence Foster Jenkins most resembles is not Marguerite but Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, and not only because both involve a suave rogue with a British accent striding down corridors while issuing high-handed commands. Though Frears doesn't stylise his images as boldly as Anderson, he too uses the wide screen like a proscenium arch to suggest theatricality, while harking back to the classic Hollywood tradition of sophisticated comedy exemplified by the 1930s and '40s work of Ernst Lubitsch.

Grant, who could easily have played Ralph Fiennes' role in Anderson's film, builds his performance around one simple imperative: St Clair must never acknowledge, by word or gesture, that Florence is anything but the magnificent singer she believes herself to be. This brings the film very close to Lubitsch, whose characters are always winking at open secrets while abiding by a code of discretion. By any conventional standard, St Clair is a complete scoundrel: he cheats on Florence, sponges on her and shamelessly indulges her delusions. But he never does the one thing which, in his eyes, would be unforgivable: he never tells her the truth.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald