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.