We’re so accustomed to watching Meryl Streep do things very well that it’s a rather refreshing novelty to watch her doing something very badly, even if she’s very good at being very bad. That, more or less, is the chief selling point of Florence Foster Jenkins (Fox, PG), Stephen Frears’s bright, bubbleweight biopic of the Manhattan socialite and aspiring but tone-deaf soprano who, thanks to immense wealth and a public high on irony, managed to sell out Carnegie Hall with her lusty squawking.
Jenkins’s story has already been told, to fictionalised and more nuanced effect, in the recent French film Marguerite, while Frears’s peppier interpretation glides disappointingly past its queasier moral equations. In making a key villain out of her most honest critic, and cheering along with her largely condescending patrons, the film pertains to be about the triumph of the spirit, though it’s money, above all, that is the maker of dreams here. A flub as a fable, then, it’s still a zesty actors’ showcase. Streep digs into the character’s essential absurdity with beaming, trilling gusto, but hers isn’t even the best performance here: as St Clair Bayfield, Jenkins’s sweetly cynical enabler of a partner, a superb Hugh Grant gives the film the streak of elegant ambivalence it otherwise sorely lacks.
At present, Captain America: Civil War (Disney, 12) stands as the year’s highest-grossing film, though it doesn’t repay its audience’s adoration with much soul of its own. Title notwithstanding, it continues the Avengers’ collective war on international terror, with the twist that an ideological disagreement has incited a clash between the wholesome eponymous hero and Robert Downey Jr’s more slippery Iron Man. That novelty aside, it’s business as usual, though the huge, daft pyrotechnics have been scaled down slightly to accommodate some political to-and-fro. If anything, the well-choreographed combat scenes, of which there are still many, seem to stand in the way of more complicatedly compelling drama.
Lavishly acclaimed and Emmy-approved in the US, Ryan Murphy’s self-explanatory procedural miniseries The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story (Fox, 15) isn’t quite the firecracker I was led to expect. It’s certainly confidently compulsive stuff, countering sensationalism with intricate legal process. But in this supposed golden age for US television, I was surprised by how much of it evokes a previous, more lurid and lumbering era of TV film, with some dodgy stunt casting (notably John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Simpson’s lawyer) only just redeemed by Sarah Paulson’s marvellous Marcia Clark, the prosecutor.
The most interesting film out this week, French screenwriter (and Jacques Audiard collaborator) Thomas Bidegain’s directorial debut Les cowboys (Studiocanal, 12) coolly meshes American and European cultural sensibilities from the title downwards. Riffing off John Ford’s The Searchers, this story of a country-and-western-fixated family on a globe-trotting search for their daughter, awol after eloping with a Muslim lad, consistently surprises with its balance of rugged genre storytelling and heated, contemporary political examination.
I’m writing from the humid, Aperol-soaked climes of the Venice film festival, the star attractions of which will take months to trickle through to cinemas. Those at home craving a hint of festival discovery, however, should head to the on-demand site FestivalScope.com, where 18 lower-profile titles from this year’s Venice programme will be available to stream for 10 days after their festival premiere. They’re so fresh, in other words, that I can’t make any first-hand recommendations yet. Among others, I’ll be eyeing King of the Belgians, a surreal political road comedy from directors Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens (whose 2012 film The Fifth Season was a dreamy, delirious treat), and The Orchid Seller, a son-to-father documentary portrait by last year’s Golden Lion winner Lorenzo Vigas. This worldwide digital bridging represents the future of the film festival experience: have a browse and take a chance.
