Florence Foster Jenkins

Seen at the wonderful cinema by the beach at Avoca Beach in NSW, Australia

Cecil says: We don't normally let such a long time lapse between watching a film and blogging but life and commitments got in the way of this blog big time in recent months.

We didn't really care what film we saw when we turned up at the beautiful little arthouse cinema in Avoca Beach. The idea was just to experience this lovely community cinema on a day outing along the NSW central coast.

Meryl Streep is always a great actress to watch, though I haven't enjoyed all of her films over the years and not being a great fan of operatic style singing, I wasn't too sure how I'd enjoy this depiction of a wealthy socialite in 1940s New York who can't sing but wants to appear as a diva on the main operatic stages of the East Coast.

Streep does a great job here; I gather she actually can sing, and I guess only a really talented singer would be able to mimic such bad singing so well. Otherwise they'd have had to cast someone as bad as Jenkins herself was in real life.

Actually the actor who stole this one - and got the most laughs out of me through the film - was Simon Helberg, who plays her wonderful accompanist. The guy knows it could ruin his career to be on the stage with someone who is so patently bad, but he sticks at it and takes the risk.

You get the sense that his motives were out of loyalty and - in part - affection for the lonely socialite Jenkins. Similarly, Hugh Grant, playing her partner/lover St Clair Bayfield, tries to the end to prevent her from going on stage, and then from seeing the media coverage of her performance to shelter her from the truth.

But the film, while giving a few good laughs for its comic storyline, is a melancholic tale too really. Surely, it would have been a lot easier and saved a lot of energy to tell the old fool how badly she sang early on, but then it would have both hurt her feelings terribly and deprived the boys in uniform of a thousand morale-boosting laughs at her expense.

I kind of enjoyed it, but it wasn't such a feel-good movie for a comedy.

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Bea says: 
Cecil and I are both choral singers, although neither of us really follow operatic style singing, but we were in the right place, right time to see this latest effort from Streep, and singing does interest us, so we gave it a go.

Cecil is right - it has a melancholic turn, with the themes tackling dreams (and what happens if they are unrealistic), loneliness, the isolation of wealth, illness, marriage, loyalty and - for want of a better way of expressing it - being a good person.  Sometimes, I felt the film struggled to hold onto these higher level themes, and had to work to keep out of the realm of laughing at Jenkins - who absolutely did not deserve to be laughed at.  It had to walk a line between presenting Jenkins as an old fool, and presenting her as a flawed human being, like every one of us, who has a dream that we are a bit afraid of, but would love to do, and who has flawed people in our lives that we love.

Luckily, the film starred Streep who did the best she could in walking that line; Grant, who also did a fantastic job at portraying his character in more than a two dimensional way.  It was great to see Helberg move out of sitcom territory, and also show his skill at portraying the light and shade of life, as the impoverished accompanist afraid of the implications on his career, but committed to seeing it through.

I was also intrigued by the footnote at the end of the film - that Jenkins' recordings are the most borrowed from the sound archive of New York.  So she did achieve some kind of success, however we measure that, and whatever the reason for their frequent borrowing.  I left the film full of admiration for Jenkins, but it left a bittersweet taste.  A great antidote to reality TV talent shows. Watch this, instead of them.
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