Helberg, Streep and Grant impress with marvellous performancesBBC Films

Florence Foster Jenkins was not a very good singer. She was many other things, however: a grande dame with a thirst for opera; stricken with Syphilis (then incurable, and treated with mercury and arsenic) for over 50 years; and, Stephen Frears’s charming new biopic bearing her name suggests, an heiress with a heart of gold. As played by Meryl Streep, Jenkins is hard not to adore during her last days in World War II-era New York.

While Florence Foster Jenkins stars Streep, who won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in Frears’s The Iron Lady, its treatment is most similar to his Helen Mirren vehicle The Queen. As in that movie, the story told concerns a series of events during a short period of Mrs Jenkins’s life. Her 'common law husband', St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant, in a sort of grown-up Daniel Cleaver who’s found a heart role) and pianist, Cosmé McMoon (a camp Simon Helberg, otherwise known as Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory) are vital cogs in the machine that allows for Jenkins’s self-deception – as she takes lessons and sings lustily, apparently oblivious to her limitations – to continue and unfold.

A vignette portraying people who keep up a charade out of love or greed (often the case here, as shown most jarringly through David Haig’s brief appearance as a gratingly oleaginous singing teacher) can be a difficult thing to pull off. Not everyone is in on the joke, so Grant’s Bayfield has a tough job keeping people on script. This is half the fun. The movie it brings closest to mind is Good Bye, Lenin!, the 2003 German film about a son who tries to convince his mother that East Germany won the Cold War after she recovers from a coma on the eve of German reunification. Much like that film, Florence Foster Jenkins is a touching portrayal of a labour of love that goes on for a long time. How much are we willing to do for those whom we love, whatever form that affection might take?

Unlike Good Bye, Lenin!, though, this movie does engage with the flip-side of the charade. Bayfield is no saint. He keeps another apartment further downtown from Jenkins’s palatial apartment on East 37th Street (in sight of the Empire State Building), where he goes for his “sport”. Jenkins has to be wilfully blind to some things, too. New York in the 1940s, even in the well-off milieu that Mrs Jenkins inhabited, is a grimier place than the Whitehall or Balmoral of Frears’s earlier films. Showgirls cavort with newly rich businessmen, thus gaining an entry into high society. Sailors on shore leave are “disrespectful”, as McMoon puts it.

The backdrop here is, consequently, more jarring than in the recent Frears films set on this side of the Atlantic. The production lighting is not always sumptuous, in a world where the light is only made possible by the dark. I wonder if the palpable sense of discomfort in the scenes where we see the wider world is deliberate. There is still an affection for a historical time and place here, but it is qualified. Life has not always been kind to Mrs Jenkins, as is underscored by the film’s scenes outside her fortress-like apartment.

This does not detract from what is at all times a very watchable and generally uplifting 100 minutes. The timing of its release might mean that the movie is not in the hunt for Oscars, despite marvellous performances from Grant, Helberg, and, above all, Meryl Streep (has cinema seen someone who’s been so good for so long since Katherine Hepburn?). Perhaps this is only appropriate. This is a movie about someone who was not very good at something, but who still had a great time doing it. In Ricki and the Flash Streep plays a woman who can sing but makes the people around her miserable in the process. Here things are reversed.

In an exam term when we face the prospect of capricious questions and unsympathetic markers – here I confess that this review was delayed due to one whose unfathomable judgments sent me into paroxysms of self-doubt and queries as to the meaning of life for much of the past week – it is worth being reminded that at some level we do some things for enjoyment rather than merely to meet others’ pre-ordained (and unreasonable or indefensible) standards.

After all, as Mrs Jenkins reminds us triumphantly, much of the fun in life is in being able to say “I did” as much as “I could”. In the event that you need to be reminded of this in coming days, weeks, and months, Florence Foster Jenkins is required viewing. If you are in the happy position where you don’t, watch it anyway.