The joy of watching Florence Foster Jenkins is very much like that garnered when seeing someone belt out a bad karaoke version of a song, or witnessing a candidate with great enthusiasm but little talent perform on Arab Idol.
It is not so much about laughing at their inadequacy (although that often comes into it), as admiring their gusto.
Meryl Streep – an actress routinely praised for her authentic genius – seems especially buoyed by the opportunity to play Jenkins, a real life New York socialite who, from the 1920s to the 1940s used her power, influence and money to perform opera concerts despite having a singing voice roughly the equivalent of a pneumatic drill.
Streep’s performance seems especially fresh coming as an encore to her muted turn as a struggling rock star in Jonathan Demme’s lamentable Ricki and the Flash (2015).
Streep has a ball, wearing extravagant cheap prom dresses and performing excruciatingly badly on stage. Yet she does not play Jenkins as a lamentable, pitiful figure, instead portraying her as a self-aware exhibitionist who chooses to ignore the bad vibes.
This is a tone that ensures that the film remains light-hearted – and can conveniently gloss over some of the heavier social questions raised by the story, along with Jenkins reported real-life dependence on pills.
British director Stephen Frears is also back on fine form after The Program, his staid biopic on drugs-cheat cyclist Lance Armstrong.
As Tim Burton did when making his 1994 film Ed Wood about the critically derided B-movie director, Frears chooses to look with affection and admiration at his protagonist, rather than with snobbish disdain or by rolling his eyes, which was the reaction of most critics to her infamous 1944 concert at Carnegie Hall, the planning for which forms the bulk of this Golden Globe-nominated film.
The chief concert planner – and something of a revelation in the film – is Hugh Grant. He plays Jenkins’s confidant, manager and partner St Clair Bayfield. The failed actor (Bayfield, not Grant) indulges Jenkins because she is his meal ticket and point of access to high society. He is also a philandering charmer with a heart of gold, and it is Grant’s inimitable ability to be so endearing while being so very wicked that makes his performance winning.
Bayfield’s main aim is to sell lots of tickets for Jenkins’s concert at Carnegie Hall and keep the nasty critics away, with a sneering Christian McKay as New York Post scribe Earl Wilson the principal villain of the piece.
Unlike their comments about the real Jenkins, critics have been very kind to this film – and by the time the final curtain falls, you too are likely to be singing its praises.
Read more;www.KissyProm.co.uk