believing against the
truth
by Douglas Messerli
Nicholas Martin (screenplay), Stephen Frears
(director) Florence Foster Jenkins / 2016
Poor Meryl Streep, pouring out her heart in
her Julia Child-ramped up voice, singing as off key as she possibly can
(working against her true singing ability), and tearing up whenever possible in
an attempt to bring the phenomenon known as Florence Foster Jenkins to life! If
only writer Nicholas Martin had given her something to hang onto besides the
fact that this clearly eccentric, wealthy woman simply adored music and had
suffered the life-long indignities of syphilis (a disease Streep was also asked
to suffer as Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa)! What to make of this
cypher, who we are led to believe was completely deluded about her own musical
abilities?
In
real life, as opera historian Albert Innaurato has written, “She was compos
mentis, she was not a lunatic.” After contributing money from her large
inheritance to most of New York’s major musical organizations, including her
beloved Verdi Club—which supported English-language translations of great opera
(a regular member of which was none other than Enrico Caruso)—and carefully
arranging her personal recitals herself to be attended by only close friends
and “sympathetic critics,” while simultaneously planning every detail from the
seating to the food, Jenkins, a 19th-century relic, dared to move on to
international acclaim through a private recording on Melotone (a best-seller
at the time) and to rent out Carnegie hall in 1944 for open attendance, along
with free tickets for 1000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
The film by Stephen Frears, on the other hand, seems to suggest that she
was utterly deluded, and that all the careful arrangements were the result of
her “husband” St. Clair Bayfield’s (Hugh Grant) secret interferences, again
leaving Streep’s character on the hook as a chimera.
Did or did she not actually know that she couldn’t really sing? The
movie gives her little wriggling room, showing her finally coming to the
realization only on her death bed—when in truth she had expressed the sentiment
several years earlier—“some say I can’t sing, but no one can say that I didn’t
sing.”
Fortunately, this well-meaning biopic, alas without a real biography of
its hero, surrounds Jenkins/Streep with a loving cast, most notably Grant, in
what is perhaps one of his most appealing acting turns of his entire career. As
her clearly loving suitor—although we’re never certain he’s in it for the money
or truly loves her—Bayfield arranges everything behind the scenes, bribing
music teachers, critics, cooks, and even newspaper sellers to make sure that Madame
Florence is given the highest of praise or, at least, is kept out of truth’s
way.
No
matter that he has a separate apartment in which he keeps a mistress, Kathleen
Weatherley (Rebecca Ferguson), where he lives a far more bohemian life—hinted
at in a wonderful dance scene wherein we are mostly convinced that it is Grant
himself that is hefting his body across the screen—that his “wife” would surely
not have approved of.
One can only wonder what Bayfield’s life was really like, but Grant
portrays it as nearly maniacal. After carefully putting his beloved Jenkins to
sleep, he rushes by taxi across town to celebrate his personal bacchanals
before rising each morning to plan out the next day for the diva. It’s clear,
at least from this film’s perspective, that he deserved whatever gifts she gave
and had promised him. He is presented as a kind of saint, and Grant gracefully
accepts the halo awarded him.
And, in that sense, we do believe in his love, particularly since, even
after he loses the affections of his mistress, he remains fiercely loyal to his
“real" wife (we never know whether or not they are truly married), with
whom he has never had sex. He was her protector, her only protector, in a world
of laughing hyenas.
Yet
those laughing hyenas—which, of course, also include the audience for this
film—might be tamed if only they took into account Jenkins’ belief in her own
talent. Yes, her singing was hilariously funny, but it also attracted a wide
audience, including Cole Porter, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Kitty Carlisle,
dancer Marge Champion, Lily Pons and her husband, orchestral musical conductor
Andre Kostelanetz (in this film we see only Porter and actress Tallulah
Bankhead in attendance), all of whom, presumably, did not attend Jenkins’
concerts merely to laugh. Hopefully, they saw this outrageous personality as a
bigger-than-life figure who believed in herself enough to imagine that she
might contribute to the passions of her life, and who, if nothing else, was
very highly entertaining in a time of darkness.
In Frears’ film, after some few moments of abuse at her Carnegie
concert, the attending military figures and others are called out by a coarse
and gauche former showgirl, Agnes Stark (Nina Arianda) who begs for the
audience to give “the dame a chance.” Miraculously, they do, and despite her
inability to control a single phrase or to remain in key for more than a few
seconds, Jenkins wins them over simply with the force of her determination. It
was, after all, a time—not unlike our own—when believing was so very difficult.
Yet
what makes this film truly enchanting is the existence of Madame Florence’s
piano player with the very strange name (actually his historical name, although
sources declare it’s a pseudonym) Cosmé McMoon—played with perfection by Simon
Helberg, who must be gifted with some kind of award for this performance. Hired
for what he has presumed as an accompanist only for her singing studies, he
eventually discovers that his whole career as a pianist and composer may be in
jeopardy when he is forced to play for her in major concerts, particularly at
Carnegie Hall. He too, in the very beginning, is a “laughing hyena,” unable to
control his chuckles as he comes away from their first encounter.
But over time, gradually getting to know this towering matron, he grows
to respect her. One of the sweetest and most enduring scenes of Frears’ film is
when, unexpectedly, Jenkins visits the meek gay man’s apartment in the midst of
his body workouts, complete with his male fitness magazines (which my
companion Howard Fox and I immediately recognized as “whacking material” of the
time). McMoon’s place is a mess, dirty dinnerware still sitting on the table,
and Jenkins, as richly garbed as she was always (in wonderful costumes by
Consalata Boyle), insists she will wash up his dishes in return for his piano
playing.
Abashed by her intrusion, yet unable to deny her, he begins to play,
first some of his own music, to which she insists she will set lyrics; and
then, one of the pieces she herself had played before her left hand had become
terribly marred from the mercury treatments for the syphilis she had received
as a young bride from her first husband. Playing the right hand, she is
accompanied by McMoon (Helberg, a former concert pianist, despite his notoriety
as a comic, played all the music on piano in the film) in a painfully
transcendent scene where the two truly do empathically embrace. It’s the very
best scene, perhaps, of the film, for it finally brings some insight into this
mysterious woman’s passions.
After having lost everything, except money, it was only music she truly
loved. So what if she herself couldn’t sing? She could imagine what it might be
like to do so. She would attempt the most impossible arias. And she could
convince a few others, and obviously herself, that she was truly singing as
artfully and beautifully as she imagined it to be. In a final death scene, she
hears herself—Streep finally singing as artfully as she can—as she imagines it
to have been. Even if many might have laughed behind her back, others—except
the obvious newspaper hacks, which this film (I think mistakenly) suggests
killed her*—perceived her indomitability of belief, a quality which, of course,
can be terrifying, but also is sadly lacking in our world in which belief is
always alternating, changing, and diminished.
Finally, we perceive all of the film’s major figures as truly failed
beings. Bayfield was clearly a hack actor who could never have achieved
anything great. McMoon, not truly a significant pianist and who was an even
lesser composer, would never have achieved anything major in his career —some
biographies claim he later established a gay escort service, while others
suggest he judged male physique contests. Florence Foster Jenkins, as we know,
was a fraud. But it was only through her, momentarily, that these men achieved
something other than where their careers would have taken them. McMoon, despite
the odds against him, played Carnegie Hall, and Bayfield organized the concert
as well as Jenkins’ entire career. Perhaps that was enough to take them out of
their ordinariness forever.
*In truth, she had a heart attack five days
after her concert, and not presumably because of the reviews. She died of
consequences of her disease, not because of the shock of reality of her singing
career.
Los Angeles, August 27, 2016
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2016).
