One of Frears’s most memorable moments was filming Streep as she is descending from the rafters of a stage, dressed as an angel and suspended in mid-air by wire cables for the movie’s opening scene. And while some have complained that Streep has a monopoly on plum screen roles for women her age, that very rafter-reaching enthusiasm makes her an ideal fit for Jenkins, even if incompetence can hardly come easily to her. (Viewers should know well by now that the star can more than capably hold a tune.) Streep certainly has a ball mimicking the scarcely human strangulations of Jenkins’ vocal technique, though her characterization skates graciously shy of belittling burlesque: There’s an empathetic ardor for performance at work here, one that deftly coaxes even bewildered viewers into her corner.
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Start polishing a possible fourth Academy Award statuette for Meryl Streep.
It also helps that she doesn’t sing until nearly 30 minutes into the movie, although the heavy-handed sentimental finale does threaten to let the air of this tasty cinematic soufflé. She and St. Clair have “an understanding”. It’s not as easy as it looks.
During the production, Frears revealed Streep had no difficulty reproducing bad singing. She even trained with Beverly Sills’ vocal coach, Estelle Liebling. In addition, the woman widely believed to be America’s greatest big screen actress has also previously depicted real life historical figures, such as Margaret Thatcher in 2011’s The Iron Lady; another Brit, feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, in 2015’s great Suffragette; chef Julia Child in 2009’s rather progressive, anti-McCarthyite Julie & Julia;plus the nearly certainly innocent Ethel Rosenberg in the 2003 HBO series Angels in America, playing the wrongfully electrocuted so-called “atomic spy” as an avenging angel. “But it’s a voice I don’t have anymore”.
But this is La Streep we’re talking about, and she shall not be denied. But he also loves her, in his own way, and Grant – always at his best while playing slightly caddish fellows – ably walks the line between lover and gigolo.
“These arias are no joke”, says Levy, “even if you’re singing off-key – especially off-key, which strains the voice”. Streep came to Levy twice a week for four months a year ago, standing in his studio, with its upright piano, a couple of chairs, a music stand. Its OK to laugh at her, because shes awful, but not in a mean way, OK? A failed Shakespearean actor, he knows his place – and it’s standing right by Jenkins, making sure that this Potemkin Village he’s built around her of supposedly adoring fans and besotted critics remains standing. That she’s interested in playing them is often the reason the film gets made at all.
As for her singing, it reminds us that to sing this badly, the singer has to be able to sing well.
As with everything, Levy adds, she was precise – they “road-mapped” where she’d go flat, where words got garbled, where trills worked and “where they sounded like a flying saucer coming in from Mars”. “And that’s why professional opera singers have to keep on studying, throughout their careers”. The money helped, too.Now a good deal of her performance difficulty and eccentricity is attributed to her syphilis (and concomitant drug addiction) which was untreatable at the time, but back then she was simply seen as… what?
“It was unusual to see someone so accomplished still put in that much time and energy”, he says.
“The first time I heard her, I was in university”, recalls Canadian opera star and CBC broadcaster Ben Heppner. “We had a lot of music to get through”. Streep is the titular Florence, a very rich patron of the arts with an undying passion for music. She’d be a reality-show sensation.
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Yes, he loves the life that her generosity provides. Lady Florence wanted to share, not take. “I can remember the joy of listening to her recordings”. Helberg is best known for his role on TV’s The Big Bang Theory, but I think his talents shine brighter here. She finds perfection in Florence’s woefully imperfect pitch, tenderness in her sandpaper timbre, toughness in her ambition, and a special kind of artistic integrity in her dulcet delusions. “So. how bad is that?”
