Review of Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) by Greg C — 13 Aug 2016

Hollywood sometimes plays to itself. Here, a woman uses her money and prestige to indulge her passion above her talent and skill level in order to play Carnegie Hall. Even though she is quite ill and her motive for booking Carnegie is altruistic, and her records have done unusually well in the intervening decades, expecting the movie audience to find sympathy in it, feels a bit,.

.. tone deaf. The dramatic crux comes where Florence is on stage being laughed at or reading the reviews in a newspaper after an opening night. When Hollywood lays this out at the central crisis of a story, it is more about themselves than the characters.

Ms Henderson is a real person, so there is a bit of biography here. The production is all well done including the acting by Streep, Grant, and Helberg. In short, how is this movie? It is fine. It's just not enough to tear open my heart.