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‘Florence Foster Jenkins’ or ‘Marguerite’ – Same Story, Very Different Films

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

There must be something about Florence Foster Jenkins that matters to us now. Jenkins, a wealthy dowager, loved music, but in conventional terms was an unspeakably horrible singer. You can hear recordings of her, and her singing is beyond awful. Jenkins performed privately for friends, who apparently liked the soirees, but in 1944, when she put on the Carnegie Hall show, the public humiliation destroyed her, and Jenkins died just a few weeks later.

The French film Marguerite, by Xavier Giannoli, which came here in April, moves the story to France, calls the character Marguerite Dumont and never quite lets you know if she’s unaware of herself or if she’s a fine Dada artist.  The newer film, by British filmmaker Stephen Frears, keeps the story in New York, with Meryl Streep as Jenkins, Hugh Grant as Jenkins’ long-time companion St. Clair Bayfield, and a delirious Simon Helberg as Jenkins’s daft accompanist  CosméMcMoon, These are the real names of people in Jenkins’s life, and the broad events in the movie are close to the events of Jenkins’s last few weeks in this world.

It’s a bit hard to see the movie Florence Foster Jenkins clearly because of Marguerite, which has a more complex bundle of thoughts about its character. Marguerite is a starker movie, and it’s less frilly. The newer picture huffs and puffs. It opens with an on-stage tableau in which Jenkins descends from above as an angel, complete with feathery wings. She looks more self-indulgent than Marguerite and maybe less capable of Marguerite’s psychological complexity.

Florence Foster Jenkins, the movie, is more simplistic than Marguerite, in some ways. Jenkins may be a rotten singer, but she’s filled with admirable devotion to music, and even though she’s vain and pretentious, it’s all okay because down deep she’s nice. Marguerite doesn’t let the audience off the hook so easily.

But many good things come from the obviously bigger budget for Florence Foster Jenkins. It’s a lush and splendid movie, and it has rich, evocative performances from its expensive actors. Streep is, of course, Streep. Director Stephen Frears got from Hugh Grant the finest performance of his film career so far. The smirks and bumbling’s are gone, and so is Grant’s apparent and annoying delight in his own good looks and charm. Here, Grant plays a man aging, desperate and trapped in multiple deceptions.

Like Marguerite, Florence Foster Jenkins looks at the question of authority surrounding matters of taste. Who determines that Jenkins’s singing is unacceptably bad? People from Europe and America may recoil at the sound of singing from India and some of what sounds cacophonous to us in Chinese music – but the Indians and Chinese may think the same things about our music. The work of the French Impressionist painters – now thoroughly celebrated – was despised as incoherent and disgusting by the good people of the day. Taste is a cultural construct, a social convention.

Florence Foster Jenkins is especially perceptive on the question of how people evaluate and define themselves. Largely, we rely on the reactions of other people, and so does Jenkins. Her companion St. Clair Bayfield is on the one hand a liar and a sycophant who betrays her with his lover and even worse with his constant praise. But from another point of view, he’s a dear man who sacrifices his own life for hers, and protects this tender woman from the cruelties of the world around her.

Fictional movie superheroes, as well as actual public figures – and many regular people also – are locked in their own cocoons, certain that they are good and right. By that standard, Florence Foster Jenkins is not profoundly unusual. Some of those self-deluded people wage war and mistreat other people. All Florence Foster Jenkins does in this movie is sing – and her singing never harms a soul.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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