Florence Foster Jenkins

For the last day of my film class this summer, we watched Meryl Streep’s latest movie, Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s a period piece biopic set in 1940s, moneyed, upper crust New York City.  Florence Foster Jenkins is a wealthy socialite who adores music and is a major patron of the arts. More than that, she fancies herself a singer. The problem, of course, is that she unequivocally cannot. Sing, that is. The film centers on the lead up to Jenkins’ famous Carnegie Hall concert that she gave just prior to her death.

After we watched the film, I asked my students how many of them would have chosen to watch it on their own. No one raised their hand. Then I asked how many of them were glad that they had seen it anyway. All of them raised their hands. I might think their positive response was just end of semester sucking up except for two things. Number one, these students had no problem telling me when they hated a movie we watched together. Number two, Florence Foster Jenkins is a wonderful film that’s so well made and is such a force of loveliness in both its production and narrative that even the jaded moviegoer will probably be helpless before its charms. 

Streep plays Jenkins, a slightly dotty, very wealthy heiress who simply loves music. She founds music appreciation clubs, sponsors concerts, and gives money willy nilly to the likes of Arturo Toscanini, the great conductor when he comes asking for cash. Streep plays her character as a child who never had to grow up and who makes conscious choices to simply not think about the more unpleasant parts of life. Her zeal and enthusiasm as well as her quirks are seemingly boundless. Her cluenessness about her inability to even carry a note seems to be driven more by hope and love than by being delusional or unintelligent. Her performances are simultaneously hard to listen to and endearing.

 

Hugh Grant plays Jenkins’ husband, St. Clair Bayfield, a moderately talented British actor who acts as her protector, agent, and number one cheerleader. Grant’s inherent smoothness and utter Britishness serve him well here as he tries to maintain the perfection of Florence’s world. His job is to make sure nothing troubles the waters even when it means paying off music critics and only selling concert tickets to what he calls “true music lovers,” which is his code for people who won’t make fun of his wife. Bayfield becomes a more complicated character when we find that he and his wife have never consummated their relationship and that he lives in a separate apartment from her with a much younger girlfriend. Instead of simply making him a lecherous cad, the film suggests that Bayfield was legitimately in love with both women.

The other major character is Cosme McMoon, Jenkins’ accompanist, played by Simon Helberg of TV’s The Big Bang Theory. Helberg’s McMoon is a twitchy bag of nerves and tics who is alternately amused and horrified by his patroness’s singing. He wants to be a serious musician and certainly appreciates the connections and opportunities he gets through his relationship with Jenkins and Bayfield. But he also wonders, what good is it to play at Carnegie Hall is it’s to accompany a performance that’s a disaster? At first, McMoon sticks around because the paychecks are too big to forfeit, but eventually, it becomes apparent that he too is rooting for his talentless but wonderful boss.

Ultimately, Florence Foster Jenkins is about love. It’s about loving something even if you’re not any good at it, loving another person even if your relationship isn’t the ideal you envisioned when you were young. It’s about loving people who try. See it and I bet that, like my students, you will be glad you did. 

Jason Bourne

When we see Matt Damon as Jason Bourne for the first time in the newest installment of the superspy franchise, he looks weary. His hair has begun to gray and there’s a heaviness to his face that wasn’t there when we saw him last in 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum. It’s been almost a decade since we last visited the tortured superspy as he continued his fight to figure out who he really is and to reclaim his humanity. And frankly, he looks a little tired. One could argue that the series should have ended in 2007 and that the reason Bourne looks old is because he is.

Julia Styles, who plays Bourne’s former handler Nikki is the only other returning cast member from the previous films. She is now closer to being 40 than to being the 21 year old she was in The Bourne Identity. Like Matt Damon, Styles looks fatigued. In fact, in her hair and makeup, she actually looks very much like Joan Allen’s character, deputy CIA director Pamela Landy, from the second and third films. As easy as it is to make jokes about aging actors trying to milk action roles meant for younger people, I can’t help but feel that Stiles’ resemblance to the much older Allen as well as Damon’s age is a purposeful choice made by the filmmakers.

Their age and weariness are meant to show what a lifetime of spying and killing and continually crossing both political and personal boundaries in the name of the greater good can do. Bourne is worn down by his guilt over his past. Nikki has seen things and had to make choices that have aged her beyond her years. Sometimes actors aging over the course of a long franchise doesn’t work out very well, but in this case, embracing it is a nice touch.

Overall, I was slightly disappointed in Jason Bourne. Not because it didn’t deliver what I’ve come expect from the films but because it delivered exactly that. It hits all the familiar beats, right down to the whip-fast shots of Bourne repeatedly hammering the clutch and shifting gears during a harrowing car chase. There’s the craggy CIA boss played by an older character actor with so much gravitas that he doesn’t actually have to act. In the past it was Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, David Strathairn, and Scott Glenn. This time around, it’s the craggiest of the craggy, Tommy Lee Jones. It has the winsome, vaguely defined love interest that meets and ugly, abrupt fate. It has a motorcycle chase up and down winding European stairways, and an anxiety inducing car chase, this time through the streets of Las Vegas, that uses the cars themselves as bludgeoning weapons.

It has all the elements that made the first three Matt Damon Bourne movies among the best, most visceral, least sentimental action films of the last two decades. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that it doesn’t really bring much that’s new. I’m all in favor of familiarity, even retelling a story altogether, as long as there’s something new revealed in the revision.

The only new element is Alicia Vikander’s Heather Lee, a Lady Macbeth CIA Cyber Ops chief. Her sly, slithery, side-eye-filled performance actually had me wondering what she was really up for the whole film. And that’s great because there isn’t a lot of mystery about who is going to come out on top in the battle between Bourne and the CIA or its latest menacing European assassin asset in the form of Vincent Cassell. But it’s precious little that’s new and that’s too bad.

I shouldn’t complain. Jason Bourne’s quality is still head-and-shoulders above most of the other films released this summer. There may not be a lot that’s new, but even the old stuff is still really good.

Cleopatra

As a movie fan, I’m interested in extremity – what’s the longest movie ever released and what’s the shortest? Which were the biggest money makers, and which were the biggest financial flops. What film won the most Oscars and which won the most Golden Raspberries? Which had the biggest cast, biggest budget, biggest profit margin, or most universal critical acclaim. I’m particularly interested in giant failures, movies that misfire so badly either critically or creatively that they end careers, bring down studios, and go on to live as punchlines for years. Movie making is such a long, expensive, collaborative undertaking, when a movie like Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar or The Last Action Hero or John Carter comes along, I have to wonder, where did it go wrong? At what point in the process did things just fall apart? Didn’t somebody say, “Hey, whoa guys. We’re spending millions of dollars and this movie is actually kind of bad. Maybe we should change it so that it’s not so bad.” Of course they did. And sometimes those tweaks saved the picture. And sometimes they made things a million times worse.

 This last week, I finished a personal one-movie extreme marathon of my own. I watched all of 1963’s Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. The picture is the zenith of overstuffed, over-indulgent classic Hollywood filmmaking at the very tail end of the classic Hollywood period. This long, rambling story of desire and conquest literally had a cast of thousands, was the most expensive movie in history up to that point, featured a record-setting number of 65 costume changes for Elizabeth Taylor, and had an original running time of six hours. The film was directed by three different men over the three years it took to get the thing made and at least two of the lead actors bowed out before finishing, causing their scenes to have to be reshot. Many of the ornate, over the top sets had to be constructed twice, once in London and then again in Rome. Elizabeth Taylor had a health crisis in the middle of filming and had to have an emergency tracheotomy which shut production down for six months. Partly because of that delay, Taylor’s salary ballooned from an already record-breaking one million dollars to an almost laughable seven million dollars. Adjusted for inflation today, that would be the equivalent of her getting paid over fifty four million dollars. The total cost of the film ended up being 31 million dollars which in today’s dollars would be 340 million. It almost bankrupted 20^th Century Fox. As if all that wasn’t trouble enough, it was on the set of Cleopatra that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton met for the first time and began the adulterous affair that blew apart both their current marriages and marked the start of their notoriously tumultuous relationship.

Now, of course, the six hour cut of Cleopatra never made it to theaters. In fact, the credited director, Joseph Mankiewicz was fired from the production not long after her presented that cut to the studio. (He was later rehired because no one else could edit together a comprehensible version of the footage he shot.) The theatrical release was somewhere around three hours long. The version that’s available on streaming now, the 50^th anniversary restored edition, is four hours and three minutes long. It’s not just a movie, it’s an investment. 

Is the movie itself any good? That’s almost beside the point. If you’re watching a four hour epic with a backstory like Cleopatra has, it’s much more about the experience and bragging rights of saying you did it. To put it simply, the movie is too much of some things and, amazingly, not enough of others. It’s extreme but that’s sort of the point. It’s a fascinating piece of Hollywood history and is worth seeing for that reason alone.