Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg give excellent performances in Stephen Frear’s biographical comedy/drama, “Florence Foster Jenkins”, which focuses on the last period of the title character's life.
Florence (Streep) is a wealthy American socialite who owns a music club in New York where she occasionally teams up with her devotee-yet-unfaithful husband, St Clair Bayfield (Grant), in a few minor shows.
St Clair, a mediocre actor and monologist, never sleeps with his wife because she has been carrying syphilis, got from her first husband, since the age of 18. Despite spending the nights in a separate house in the company of Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson), an unsecret girlfriend, St Clair does everything to please Florence, promptly attending
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Encouraged by a vocal teacher and famous maestro, she decides to hire a pianist, Cosmé McMoon (Helberg), to accompany her in a farcical and bumpy musical journey that will bring her both laughs and tears.
Convinced she’s ready for her debut concert, Florence will gain a fake stardom, only because no music lovers were admitted at the venue. Actually, most of the people in the audience, as well as a few reporters, were paid to applaud and write positive reviews about a jarring opera.
Excited with the critiques, the naive and good-hearted Florence decides to record and prepare herself for the next big step: to sing at the demanding Carnegie Hall.
The embarrassed McMoon only showed up to play because of the sincere friendship he had with his employer. Like the sound of a shearwater, Florence hurt our ears with her calamitous melodies but managed to fulfill her dreams, entertaining a crowd that was mostly composed of soldiers.
The experienced Stephen Frears (“The Queen”, “Philomena”), who directed from a screenplay by Nicholas Martin, built the scenes on the same ground as the early screwball comedies, avoiding cheesiness on one hand, but adopting a somewhat zany posture on the