Righteous Lovebirds
Whatever our vocations, few of us have a real grasp of our
talents. We’re either better or worse than we think we are. Sometimes much
better. Sometimes much worse.
Among those whose perception most exceeded their talent was
one Florence Foster Jenkins, the titular subject of one of the best, most
delightful movies now playing.
Florence Foster
Jenkins (1868-1944) was a real-life American high-society matron of the
last century. Jenkins was gripped by a fantastic delusion: that she was an opera
singer. And a great opera singer at that. That she was completely tone deaf is the comic underpinning of much of this good-hearted
comedy, deftly directed by the excellent Stephen Frears, who has portrayed upper
class folly before in such classics as Dangerous
Liaisons and The Queen.
A passionate music lover, Jenkins founded the Verdi Club in
New York, in 1917, an exclusive society dedicated to "fostering a love and
patronage of Grand Opera in English.” What the club mostly seemed to be though
was a showcase for Jenkins’ vaunting vocal extravagances. She was no
post-modern, winking ironist, nor a Jack Benny, a competent musician playing
for laughs; She was as real and absolute as you can get. She couldn’t hit a
note in front of her, but thanks to her inherited wealth, there was nothing to
stop her in her sincerity.
That the beauty she undoubtedly heard in her own ear was not
heard by anyone else daunted her not one bit. Feeding her ambitions, she was safely
encircled by a coterie of dedicated and loving fans (the Verdi Club had a
membership of 400, including Enrico Caruso and Cole Porter). Even her vocal
coach cheerfully plays along with non-compliments like “You’ve never sounded
better.” The lengths some of the characters go to both protect her from the
truth and from having to actually hear her sing are hilarious and charming.
Her most loyal fan of all is her partner of over 30 years,
St. Clair Bayfield, a British Shakespearean actor of limited talent, but, as
the movie tells us, well aware and content with it. Played with enormous brio
and loving attention by Hugh Grant, Bayfield spends most of the movie juggling
three balls: running between Florence and his mistress Kathleen (Rebecca
Ferguson); managing Florence’s career; and, most importantly, protecting Florence
from the world’s slings and arrows, from the savaging she’s doomed to face when
she decides to step out of her bubble and under the eye of a wider public with
her legendary 1944 Carnegie Hall debut. He wins the viewer’s heart, as well.
The third pillar in the story is her long-suffering
accompanist, boyish and baffled Cosmé McMoon, played by Simon Helberg as so
uncomfortable in his skin, it just may slough off. McMoon is a shaky underfed chap
on whom a coat of paint would look baggy. He’s equally driven, except, unlike
his patron, he seems to possess great skill as a pianist. He knows he’s risking
his career ambitions, but being a musician (meaning no money), he must take the
job. It’s not long before he falls under Florence’s spell.
Florence Foster
Jenkins is a joy for most of its two hours (though some of the performances
at the bottom of the cast list are out of tune). It pulls off the difficult balancing
act of getting us to root for, and delight, in Jenkins unstoppable spirit,
while never forgetting the fact that, well, she stank up the room every time
she took the stage. (At one point, my wife and I both cried out, “No, please
no! Don’t sing that Mozart!” She tackles the “Queen of the Night” aria so hard,
I nearly called for an ambulance.)
Whatever Jenkins’ lack of pitch, director Frears and
screenwriter Nicholas Martin pitch the film just right. Most crucial of all
though is the acting and in this, Meryl Streep embodies Jenkins’ deluded grandeur
with exuberant perfection. She fully inhabits Florence Jenkins without a wink
of condescension. It’s another superb portrait in her late-career gallery of
grand eccentrics (among them, Julia Child in Julie and Julia). By embracing her with such artistry (even going
so far as to actually sing like Jenkins,
if this article is accurate), we embrace her as well.
That Hugh Grant matches her every step away, shunning his
stuttering image to play a man of unbridled dedication, is to pay the both of
them the highest of compliments. The screen is theirs.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Jules Maigret of the Direction
Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris, is one of those detectives the movies
can never let go. Even after Bruno
Cremer’s successful run at the character from the 1990s to 2000s, filmmakers
still turn to Georges Simenon’s novels for inspiration, with Rowan Atkinson
(yes, “Mr. Bean,” that’s right) the latest to take a stab at portraying the
doughy determined detective.
Where Holmes is an outsider and inspired amateur, Maigret is
the professional insider, a willing cog in the system. His appeal may, in part,
lie in his image as the perfect government bureaucrat: persistent, pragmatic, patient,
willing to cut red tape when necessary in his pursuit of truth and justice.
And, unlike Holmes, he’s not overstuffed with self-regard. He’s the clerk you
hope to encounter at the DMV, the guy you most want heading the investigative team
should you ever be murdered.
Belgian author Georges Simenon created his legendary
detective Inspector Maigret in 1931. Movie producers seized on the books almost
right away, filming them one after the other as they came out. Simenon’s fourth
Maigret novel La Tete d’un Homme (Head of a Man) was first filmed in 1933
by director Julien Duvivier (Pepe le Moko
and Tales of Manhattan).
It’s a beautifully photographed, striking film (as seen on a
DVD I checked out from the Berkeley Public Library.) The plot concerns
Maigret’s (Harry Bauer) unravelling of a murder plot involving, among others,
an emigrant medical student (Valery Inkjinoff), who, facing death from cancer,
embraces nihilism. The plot lurches about with Maigret seeming a little too
passive at several points. But the atmosphere is delightfully Parisian and the
camerawork often astounding: one sequence stations an inquiring detective in
front of a projection screen as it dissolves from scene to scene as he conducts
his interviews.
The film may seem slight. Bauer is not a particularly
memorable Maigret. But the film is a treat for fans of vintage French film and
Inspector Maigret.
Copyright 2016 by
Thomas Burchfield
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