DIVA GETS HER DUE
Meryl Streep hits the right emotional notes in the off-key ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’
Her voice could shatter aluminum, as well as fine crystal. Brace yourself and your ears for “Florence Foster Jenkins,” the inspirational true story of a New York heiress who was dead set on becoming a world-class opera singer, despite having the world’s worst voice.
Nobody but Meryl Streep — directed by Stephen Frears — could pull this thing off. It’s an oddball combination of poignant and ludicrous, like Florence herself.
Born into a wealthy Wilkes-Barre family in 1868, Flo Foster was a child prodigy pianist who performed at the White House for President Rutherford B. Hayes. When a hand injury ended her piano career, she turned her attention to singing and, at age 18, eloped with a certain Frank Jenkins — from whom she contracted syphilis on their wedding night.
Director Frears opens Florence’s story many decades later in New York City’s Seymour Hotel, where she is ensconced and much pampered by second husband St. Clair Mayfield (Hugh Grant). Nowadays, Florence is the star of her own show at the Verdi Club — founded and funded by herself — where she enacts tableaux vivants for the amusement of other wealthy club ladies and writes checks to bail out serious musicians like Toscanini when they come to her, desperately, in a pinch.
Ah, but what she really longs to do — and does — is sing. Never mind her total lack of rhythm, pitch, tone and diction. Undaunted by such deficiencies (and ridicule), she recruits a famous voice teacher and a gifted young piano accompanist named Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg of “The Big Bang Theory”) to coach her in the most difficult pieces of the soprano repertoire: the Bell Song from Lakme
and Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from “Magic Flute.”
Despite — or because of — the dismal musical quality of her invitationonly recitals, she and her outlandish costumes become perversely popular, reaching their apotheosis in her soldout (sort of) concert at Carnegie Hall at age 76.
Ms. Streep, as we know from “Mamma Mia” and “Prairie Home Companion,” et al., can croon a decent tune when she needs to. This role calls for the greater skill of delivering Florence’s songs as deliciously badly as Flo did. Result: Meryl is a shoo-in for her 20th Oscar nomination.
Mr. Grant’s performance, in which he gently removes Florence’s wig after putting her to bed, is a sweetly effective one. He strives mightily, if futilely, to protect her from the “mockers and scoffers,” even as he sneaks off to be with sexy girlfriend Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson) on the side.
Mr. Helberg, a man whose nose needs its own ZIP code, is a comic hoot as Cosme. He seems over-the-top and annoyingly mannered at first, but he gradually wins us (and Florence) over, as they truly become friends: She does his dishes, while he plays Chopin’s Prelude in E minor. In the end, he steals the show. You heard it first here: He’s a guaranteed Oscar nominee — probable winner — for next year’s best supporting actor.
Director Frears (“Philomena,” “The Queen”) employs old-fashioned “wipe” edits of the period, to good effect. Nicholas Martin’s screenplay suffers from melodramatic excess, including a hepcat party to rival Feydeau farce and an overly villainous Earl Wilson of the New York Post. But Danny Cohen’s cinematography brings 1940s NYC into vibrant life, with one particularly great dollyback reverse-zoom tracking shot of Cosme giddily exiting Flo’s apartment with the gig of his life.
The most famous saga of a rich talentless woman trying to sing opera was the fictional one in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” The rich talentless woman at hand is factual — funnier and sadder for being so. Her vocal failings were due in part to a deteriorating central nervous system, compounded by the side effects of mercury and arsenic poisoning — the syphilis therapies of the day. By the time penicillin was discovered, she was too far gone to benefit from it.
Any doubt what Meryl Streep can do with this?