It’s “Florence Foster Jenkins”, a wacky yet tender comedy that gives him a key costarring role with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.
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But professional singers also need to be reminded sometimes that at the core of a great performance is a love for the art form – something Jenkins had in spades. “It would be very comforting.to see you be bad at something”, he said. “I though maybe he just enjoyed looking at these muscle magazines and looking at these guys lift weights”.
When director Stephen Frears approached Streep about starring in Florence Foster Jenkins, she knew it would be a “yes” before even reading the script. “It’s quite something to be able to sit with someone who says, ‘When I was making Sophie’s Choice, we had a similar difficulty and this is how we approached it.’ That’s quite something”.
Over the last few years, Streep has been the go-to actress when it comes to stage-to-screen adaptations, taking on Donna in Mamma Mia! Meryl Streep displays her brilliant comedic side in this period film set in 1944 based on a true story about an aging NY socialite Florence Foster Jenkins who dreams of becoming a great opera singer.
Helberg portrays Cosmo McMoon, the classical pianist who, as the accompanist to Jenkins, must walk the delicate line of controlling his reactions to her singing. It hovers around B-/B+. I have friends who are wonderful singers and I know I can never do that.
Jenkins suffered a heart attack days later and died at age 76, perhaps devastated by the realization of her musical ineptitude, as the movie suggests. It’s hopeful”, she stressed, “even if you hear her breathing wrong. Florence Foster Jenkins is very much the story of a lie for the right reason that’s never morally ambiguous or overtly cruel, which is a filmmaking feat more hard to accomplish than getting Florence to sing well. Watch below as Playbill correspondent Matt Rodin gets Broadway stars to sing just like the film’s delusional diva. His reviews can be read at cbsphilly.com/movies or heard two, three and four times a day on 1060AM.
“Be nice to me”, Helberg teased. I was shaking. and I thought, I don’t like this feeling. “I just saw the character so clearly in my head”. I took it and went home.
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If I ever have to play a person who is overcome with fear and terror I go back to that moment because I hadn’t had any trouble singing in the Christmas concert, but standing in the living room in front of my whole family – all my annoying brothers and my cousins and everybody looking at me – I just went insane. “And that, really, you’re probably the richest man I’ve ever met”.
