In the list of movies that blow most of the competition out of the water, a movie about a woman who can’t sing doesn’t seem like a shoe-in. “Florence Foster Jenkins”, starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, delightfully proves that wrong.
The titular character is an elderly woman suffering from the terminal effects of a late stage of syphilis she contracted from her first husband years ago. She had a long-standing career in music and theater but has never pursued a singing career. Her husband, St. Clair Bayfield, who she has a vaguely defined open relationship with, acts as her manager and lives to make her happy.
Determined to be a singer, Jenkins takes singing lessons, with piano music provided by Cosmé McMoon —played by Simon Helberg— only for McMoon and St. Clair to discover that she has no idea how to stay on pitch or rhythm.
Though the two desperately try to keep her lack of vocal talent under the radar, Jenkins is persistent in her endeavor to break into the singing industry but sooner or later, she’ll have to face the music — nobody likes her voice.
The movie is based on the life of the title character, who recorded herself singing and was infamous for being a terrible singer and ridiculed for it.
“It’s hard to sort of forget anything from what happened because it was such a monumental thing to be working alongside all of these incredible people,” said Helberg in a conference call interview with college newspapers, about memories of working on the film.
It was such a simple movie, incredibly funny yet with a serious tone when needed. Streep pretending to have no singing abilities was one of the funniest aspects of the movie, and it was almost as though she knew exactly how to sing in the worst possible way imaginable.
Helberg, best known for his role as Howard Wolowitz on CBS’ “Big Bang Theory, said: “Me and Meryl went into the same studio that The Beatles recorded all of their albums in and we kind of just, you know, desecrated the place because she plays this atrocious singer and we are kind of butchering all of these great pieces in music.”
Florence Foster Jenkins was a heartwarming and hilarious movie with a brilliant cast, and it’s worth going to see while in theaters.
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