Florence Foster Jenkins (movie)

Guy Noir contacted me with some remarks about this article by Megan Basham, "Florence Foster Jenkins" (World, September 3, 2016). Noir remarked:

I have not seen the movie, "FFJ."

I still can not bring myself to risk any Meryl Streep project after sitting through the effrontery that was "Mamma Mia!", and deciding she might be as self-indulgent as Streisand.

But even if this new movie is somehow affecting, as one singer-friend told me it is, this review offers a window into the modern (post-modern, or whatever you want to call it) mindset. "They're happy, so what's the conundrum." That in a nutshell is the worldview that pervades the culture in which we find ourselves.

Granted, "Mamma Mia!" was pretty appalling, despite what the greying Woodstock generation regards as good nostalgic music. Yet Streep is a terrific actress, nonetheless; just as Hugh Grant may be, to whom (in his earlier career) my own reaction is as viscerally negative as Noir's is to Streep here.

The Basham article in World magazine says that this historical 'dramedy' offers an inescapable sense of sadness. Indeed.