Review: Meryl Streep as "Florence Foster Jenkins"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

It takes a gifted singer to sing this horribly. Every other note is wrong. No phrasing goes unmangled by shortness of breath. No lovely moment meant to soar cannot be shattered by a flat ear-piercing decibel. The central conceit of Stephen Frears new comedy Florence Foster Jenkins is that Florence, a considerably wealthy patron of the arts played by Meryl Streep, lives for music but is ghastly at it. The inside joke, given the casting, is that we all know La Streep can sing with the best of them. She followed the "is there nothing she can't do?" revelation of Ironweed's tragic showstopper "He's Me Pal" (1987, Oscar-Nominated) with transcendent country crooner feeling in Postcards From the Edge (1990, Oscar-Nominated), and just kept on singing whenever a movie gave her the opportunity all the way up through last year's Ricki and the Flash which was practically a concert film there were so many scenes of Streep at the mic, rocking out.

Florence Foster Jenkins doesn't rock out. Florence is not that kind of girl and Florence, also, is not the kind of movie...

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Posterized: Director Stephen Frears

Streep & StephenThe "Posterized" series has fallen into a 'totally inconsistent director' zone. Last week we looked at Woody Allen's filmography, full of impossible peaks and embarrassing valleys and everything inbetween. The 75 year old British director Stephen Frears hasn't had peaks that are quite as dizzy from the genius altitude but his valleys aren't as cringeworthy as Allen's, either. He's a safe middle distance director that critics and audiences and Oscar can all love, albeit not stay married to. He's made 22 features over the course of his long career which began with 1971's Gumshoe after which he disappeared into epidodic British TV for a decade or so until his movie career really started to sizzle; My Beautiful Laundrette put him on the global map. But did he ever really top that breakthrough?

For all the ups and downs that followed, the consistency is his love for actresses: he famously directed Helen Mirren to her Oscar, and he's worked with Glenn Close, Judi Dench, and Michelle Pfeiffer twice each.

It's a busy summer for Frears.  He's prepping a third feature with Judi Dench called Victoria and Abdul, he's added Meryl Streep to his grande dame arsenal via Florence Foster Jenkins, and he'll receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 22nd Annual Sarajevo Film Festival which starts today.

All the Frears theatrical posters are after the jump. How many of his films have you seen?

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YNMS: Florence Foster Jenkins

Murtada here. Stephen Frears recent output has been uneven. This month, his Lance Armstrong biopic The Program was met with lukewarm reviews and a VOD purgatory release, while Lay the Favorite (2012) and Tamara Drewe (2010) were both immediately forgotten. However he does well when teamed with grand actresses in intimate dramas (The Queen, Philomena). So we are cautiously optimistic about his collaboration with Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins. The story, of an amateur opera singer, known and ridiculed for her very bad singing and her complete delusion about her abilities, is intriguing.

Let's break down the newly released trailer..... after the jump.

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It's May for Meryl

As Meryl Streep starts her jury duties at the Berlinale, Murtada has news about her next film.

Streep at the Berlinale Jury Press Conference

Gird your loins! There must be a rupture in the movie universe because we might not get the new Meryl Streep movie when we usually do. Since 2008's Mamma Mia, movies led by Streep have had only 2 release dates. The December prestige slot (Doubt, The Iron Lady, August Osage County, Into the Woods). Or late summer blockbuster comedy counter programming (Julie and Julia, Hope Springs, Ricki and the Flash). Plus one anomaly with the comedy It's Complicated inexplicably slotted into the December prestige date. Yes comedies get released year round, but not Meryl comedies!

2016 is changing all that. Pathe have announced a May 6 UK release of Streep's latest, Florence Foster Jenkins. Directed by Stephen Frears and also starring Hugh Grant and Rebecca Ferguson, the film is based on the true life story of the titular character, who was an amateur opera singer, known and ridiculed for her very bad singing and her complete delusion about her abilities. A US release date is expected soon and will probably be around the same time. Ater Ricki fizzled at the box office, it looks like Spring is now the best time for adult oriented female driven counter programming. Specially with the success last year of Woman in Gold and Far From the Madding Crowd.

Delighted to announce FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS will be released on 6 May starring #MerylStreep @HackedOffHugh pic.twitter.com/rGnI10B3UD

— Pathé UK (@patheuk) February 9, 2016

Meanwhile in Berlin, Streep started her jury duties with a bit of a controversy. At a press conference on Thursday, she began her remarks well talking about how she would give each film careful consideration because she's been on the other side, “a compassionate heart is important as an actress”. When she was asked about diversity, Streep applauded the gender diversity within her jury group.

“This jury is evidence that at least women are included and in fact dominate this jury, and that’s an unusual situation in bodies of people who make decisions. So I think the Berlinale is ahead of the game.”

But then she delved into murkier depths when addressing the lack of racial diversity within the same group:

“There is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all we’re all from Africa originally. Berliners, we’re all Africans really.”

The quote sounds like a riff on JFK’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech but when taken out of context reads clueless and clumsy. Maybe first acknowledge the omission of people of color before deflecting the question with humor. 

How excited are you for Florence? Do you think the May release date is significant in anyway?

Meryl Streep's Set to Sing Off-Key (& Other News)

Manuel here with some Streeptastic news.

Meryl Streep has just signed on to play Florence Foster Jenkins in an upcoming Stephen Frears film. Florence will follow the eponymous protagonist, a New York heiress whose lack of musical talent didn’t stop her from pursuing a career in opera in the early twentieth century. This should be good news for us Streep fans because it means we may get three back-to-back-to-back musically-centered Meryl films in a row. Remember she’s set to play Maria Callas for Mike Nichols’ HBO adaptation of Terence McNally’s Master Class while she’s currently filming Ricky and the Flash, the Diablo Cody-penned Jonathan Demme film about an aging rock-star. More thrillingly, the Frears/Demme/Nichols triple punch is the closest we’ve gotten in a while to Streep committing to working with top-tier directing talent (no offense to David Frankel, Philippa Lloyd and Philip Noyce).

It’s as if she’s been secretly reading TFE where Nat has constantly pointed out Streep’s aversion to working with high calibre directors (give or take a Jonze or an Anderson detour). It’s thrilling stuff even if it’ll continue the “Meryl gets all the roles” narrative that’s both inescapable and inevitable; she is a bankable actress after all.

I didn’t want to just share Meryl’s news (lest we faulted for playing favorites), so let’s play a game of Six Degrees and offer some more news tidbits in the process:

Frears directed Mrs Henderson Presents which is being turned into a musical at the Theatre Royal Bath next summer. That film starred Judi Dench, who is currently filming the Sam Mendes produced The Hollow Crown, a BBC drama that’s been adapting Shakespeare’s history plays. Her co-stars for this concluding entry include Benedict Cumberbatch, Sophie Okonedo (!!) and Sally Hawkins.

Dench starred in another Shakespeare property back in 1968 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with the Queen herself, Helen Mirren. It has just been announced that Mirren's Stephen Daldry-directed play The Audience, a sequel of sorts to her Oscar-winning role, is making its way to Broadway next Spring.

Daldry directed not only Streep but Julianne Moore in The Hours; Moore is currently filming Freeheld alongside Ellen Page. The film, focused as it is on a lesbian couple's struggle to apply for domestic partnership, just found itself frozen out of a filming location (a Catholic school), presumably because of its subject matter.

Moore starred with in Crazy, Stupid, Love with Ryan Gosling, whose new 1970s thriller, The Nice Guys, directed by Shane Black, just added Kim Basinger to its cast. Basinger, who we haven’t seen a while, starred in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter in 1994 with none other than Julia Roberts. Once the reigning queen of romantic comedies, Roberts famously starred in Notting Hill opposite Hugh Grant... who’ll be Meryl’s co-star in Florence.

Phew! That was slightly harder than I thought.

What other renowned film directors would you like to see Streep work with? What other connections between Streep, Mirren, Dench, Moore and Basinger did I miss as I attempted to thread them all together? Are you hoping that in a couple of month’s time we’ll be able to group these women together because they’re all Oscar winners?