Flo­rence Fos­ter Jenkins

A sto­ry so fas­ci­nat­ing they filmed it twice! Xavier Giannoli’s recent­ly released film Mar­guerite offered the fic­tion­al tale of a 1920s soci­ety heiress and patron of the arts whose toad­y­ing entourage refused to quash her dreams of star­dom by admit­ting that she could not sing for toffee.

This new film by Stephen Frears is the tale of the real Flo­rence Fos­ter Jenk­ins (played by Meryl Streep), a syphilitic dowa­ger whose sta­tus as a vaunt­ed clas­si­cal song­bird ensured that the New York cul­tur­al cognoscen­ti were able to thrive. Know­ing that she was loved is what enabled her to plunge her inher­it­ed for­tune back into the busi­ness. In real­i­ty, she sound­ed like a mangy hound dog wail­ing in an alley­way, and engi­neer­ing the white lie of her capa­bil­i­ties was her ​“hus­band”, the raff­ish ham actor St Clair Bay­field (Hugh Grant).

It’s a strange sit­u­a­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in that now we are able to log on to a social media plat­form and tell a star direct­ly just how much we adore or despise their work. (Whether they’ll actu­al­ly hear our calls through the din is anoth­er mat­ter). Yet this stranger-than-fic­tion char­ac­ter seems like a ripe excuse for a film that ques­tions the nature of tal­ent, the ethics of arts fund­ing, and how we should empathise with the trag­ic dupe at the cen­tre of it all. Alas, what Frears offers is a feath­er-light, milky-tea treat­ment of the mate­r­i­al, fram­ing Jenk­ins as lit­tle more than a roly-poly grotesque. The film is as sim­plis­tic as func­tion­al as its title would suggest.

The pen­ny is allowed to drop unfor­giv­ably ear­ly as the joke of Jenk­ins’ ear-both­er­ing war­ble (amaz­ing­ly ren­dered by Streep) is revealed with­in the film’s open­ing act. The scene sees Jenk­ins induct­ing a new piano accom­pa­nist (Simon Helberg’s pre­ten­tious dweeb, Cosme McMoon) who dis­cov­ers that his lucky break has come with some giant caveats. As informed by Bay­field, to retain his posi­tion, he must be in on the big deceit and nev­er allow the real­i­ty of his paymaster’s lack of tal­ent to become known. As writ­ten by Nicholas Mar­tin, it all comes across as a quaint stage farce where we’re the audi­ence waits for every­thing to go wrong.

Under­whelm­ing though it may be, the film isn’t a com­plete write-off. And that is large­ly down to the superb per­for­mance by Grant, an expert­ly stirred and shak­en cock­tail of self-inter­est, self-loathing and grudg­ing empa­thy. He claims that his love of wife Flo­rence is real, even though her ill health pre­cludes any kind of phys­i­cal con­sum­ma­tion. She is more like a spoiled child – he reads her a sto­ry before bed­time and, once she’s down, he’ll slip out the door to con­sort with his real lover, Kath­leen (the great Rebec­ca Fer­gu­son who is giv­en absolute­ly noth­ing to do).

This feels like a very sad sto­ry that’s been recon­fig­ured to feel buoy­ant and charm­ing. We’re invit­ed to point and laugh at Jenk­ins. Even her demise is treat­ed as a gar­ish joke, as we see her as an angel in heav­en, final­ly able to sing to her heart’s con­tent, and with­out judgement.