Five stars
I was predisposed not to like it very much. For one thing, I knew about FFJ. Sometime in the early sixties, I visited my very musical cousin in Dallas. After dinner we repaired to her little music room where she lovingly and reverently slid a record from an unmarked sleeve and placed it on her turntable. “I know you like opera,” she said. (I didn’t very much then, but I was not about to admit it to her.) In almost hushed tones, she continued mysteriously, “This is the voice of the century! Just listen.” She dimmed the lights and we both sat back to enjoy the experience. After about three measures of the “Bell Song,” from “Lakme,” I opened one eye and found her looking at me with one eye. At that point we both collapsed with laughter. She got me good.
For another thing, I am one of only forty-three people on the planet who does not believe that Meryl Streep is the world’s greatest living actress. To me, her “method” shows too much. She has a stock of tics and gestures, both physically and vocally, that she trots out when the occasion demands (one from Column A, three from Column B). Not this time: she was absolutely wonderful. She made me laugh (hysterically); she made me cry (unabashedly).
The movie is much more than a joke that FFJ is a singer who can’t sing. That punch line is revealed the first time Meryl opens her mouth. It’s much deeper than that. It’s really an amazing and deliberately ambiguous love story. Did FFJ know she was a terrible singer but who loved music so much she was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to perform it for huge crowds—some of whom were unable to contain themselves—or was she just nuts? Was her “husband,” St. Clair so devoted to her because he loved her, or because she was his meal ticket? Were the favorable (though deliberately waffled) reviews by some critics the result of bribes by St. Clair or because they admired FFJ’s guts and obvious love of music. The director never makes these things quite clear, but to me, the most revealing scene in the movie was where FFJ is seated at the piano and is absently fingering the top notes of a Chopin prelude (her left hand was damaged) and her reluctant accompanist, still standing, quietly starts playing the accompaniment.
With its themes of love, courage and kindness it's a wonderful counterpoint to the cynicism of our current age.
