Stephen Frears (2016)

Meryl Streep is, in several ways, a felicitous choice to play Florence Foster Jenkins, the New York heiress, socialite and notoriously tone-deaf amateur operatic soprano.  Streep is at her very best when she’s stretched and her versatile singing talents are well proven:  performing coloratura as ‘the world’s worst singer’ is a technical challenge which she relishes and rises to.  What she achieves vocally in this role comes as no surprise, though the lack of surprise should make us realise how much we take for granted her phenomenal range of skills.  There’s a kind of correspondence between Streep’s trademark approach to developing a characterisation – concocting idiosyncrasies of voice, face, gesture, carriage, gait – and the determined construction of Foster Jenkins’s belief in her vocal gifts.   (This isn’t to suggest that she realised she couldn’t sing but her life had been unhappy enough to compel her to ‘rejoice, having to construct something/Upon which to rejoice’.)  Most important, Meryl Streep’s own unquenchable zest for performance lifts the tale of Florence – which culminates in her recital at Carnegie Hall in October 1944 and its aftermath – well above the level of gruesome joke.  The actress’s enthusiasm for what she’s doing blends with, and communicates, the love of music and singing of the woman she’s playing.  Although she’s often funny, Streep’s generous empathy ensures that Florence is never merely a figure of fun.

The biographical source material is both slender and miserable.  In the recent Marguerite, whose fictional title character was clearly based on Foster Jenkins, the director Xavier Giannoli seemed to take every opportunity to harshen the story, especially in the description of the heroine’s marriage to a cold, cowardly, unfaithful man.  In Florence Foster Jenkins, Stephen Frears and the screenwriter Nicholas Martin adopt a more indulgent and light-hearted tone, which doesn’t mean that their approach is more superficial.  Frears’s film is, to a large extent, a show:  histrionics – sometimes hefty, often camp – are in plentiful supply off stage as well as on.  But as Ryan Gilbey notes, in his New Statesman review, the film is also ‘an unusually honest portrayal of love as a system whereby two people can maintain one another’s delusions to the point where they almost cease to be delusions at all’.  The central relationship of Florence’s life is with the superannuated Shakespearean actor and monologuist St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant).  There’s a considerable element of let’s pretend in his roles as Florence’s husband and manager.  They’re in a common law relationship; St Clair, after Florence is tucked up in bed at night, goes to sleep with his mistress Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson) in his own apartment – to be precise, in an apartment which Florence bought for him.  The manager job consists mostly of accommodating Florence’s desire to carry on singing – to audiences from the Verdi Club, which she founded and funded, and other New York musical societies to which she belongs – and to ensure, with bribes if necessary, that she doesn’t receive any bad press.  Rather than condemning St Clair as treacherous and pusillanimous, Frears and Martin take him at his word when he says that he loves Florence.

The mutual indulgence of the couple’s fantasies is rather more lop-sided than Ryan Gilbey’s words imply.  Whether or not St Clair Bayfield harbours illusions that he is (or was) a major actor, he can’t fail to notice that the sound of his performing voice is, at best, a reliable soporific at Florence’s bedtime.  At worst – as he begins to recite Keats’s ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ – Florence quickly interrupts:  ‘I think I’ll read …’   Hugh Grant evinces a rueful awareness on St Clair’s part that he’s not up to much (although the real Bayfield sustained a long career on the Broadway stage).  Is Grant partly expressing his feelings about his own talents?  It was striking, when he and Streep appeared together on The Graham Norton Show to plug the film, how deep-seated his self-deprecation seemed to be.  There are moments in Florence Foster Jenkins when Grant might be sharper but it’s not damning with faint praise to say his relative blandness is not only effective in the film but crucial to its success.  It’s both a counterweight to the more flamboyant performances going on around him and a means, as Ryan Gilbey suggests, of showing Florence Foster Jenkins to us largely through St Clair Bayfield’s affectionate eyes – without St Clair imposing himself on the action so much that he blocks the view.

Among the supporting cast, Simon Helberg is energetically, resourcefully camp as Cosmé McMoon, Florence’s increasingly anxious and incredulous pianist; David Haig is very funny in a cameo as her voice coach; Nina Arianda has terrific coarse verve as a showgirl married to a rich older man who’s a Florence fan.   Although Nicholas Martin’s screenplay is well constructed, the material is stretched pretty thin over a nearly two-hour movie.   A few bits – for example, when St Clair and Kathleen go away together on a golfing holiday – are no more than filler.   It comes as a relief, especially after Marguerite, that Stephen Frears applies a light touch to pointing up how people’s kindliness towards Florence often depends on the financial help they think she can give them.  In the case of some of her female contemporaries in the Verdi Club, however, I wasn’t sure why these other elderly women, who themselves look well heeled, were so enthusiastic about her bad singing.  (Maggie Steed, Thelma Barlow et al are amusing in these roles, even so.)  The design by Alan MacDonald and the score by Alexandre Desplat are pleasantly unremarkable. Consolata Boyle’s costumes for the leading lady are more exuberantly entertaining.

Florence Foster Jenkins died in November 1944, a few weeks after her big night at Carnegie Hall.  She suffered a heart attack just two days after the performance – brought on, supposedly, by reviews so damning that not even Florence was able to infer compliments.  (In the film, there’s a single critic, played by Christian McKay, whom St Clair Bayfield can’t buy off and who tells the truth.)   Foster Jenkins was seventy-six when she died – ten years older than Meryl Streep is now.  The way Streep looks here makes it interestingly difficult to pinpoint her character’s age: she wears considerable body padding but, as far as I could tell, no conspicuous aging make-up on her face – which is disproportionately slim atop the bulky trunk.  The face looks ancient and thin when Florence is in bed and her wig removed to reveal that she’s bald.  During examination by a doctor (John Sessions), she explains that she contracted syphilis while still a teenager, thanks to her first husband (‘bit of an alley cat’).  Streep delivers this explanation regretfully but matter-of-factly.  Florence’s willed gaiety vanishes as definitely as her wig.  She is calmly disillusioned – there’s a similar mix of wistfulness and resignation in her account, in a later conversation with Cosmé, of how her ambitions of being a concert pianist were thwarted.  Stephen Frears, who directs with an admirable balance of savvy and sympathy, lets us hear, as Florence approaches death, how her voice sounds to her.  What we hear at this point is Meryl Streep’s own, fine singing voice.   Before the closing credits come up, and we listen to recordings of the real Florence Foster Jenkins, this is a brief interlude to savour, a lovely, music-to-our-ears moment that has been earned – by the audience, by the film and by its star.

2 May 2016