Delayed Reaction: Florence Foster Jenkins

The Pitch: Meryl Streep sings very poorly and you'll still watch it because it's Meryl Streep.

It's starting to feel like there's nothing Meryl Streep can do that won't get nominated for an Oscar. Is that true though? She has 79 credits on IMDB after all, and "only" 20 Oscar nominations. Break that down though. 13 of her credits are for TV work. 5 are shorts. Another 9 are for animated project or voice/narrator credits. That means, really, we are talking about 52 roles. 20/52 = 38.5% of her filmwork gets an Oscar nomination. That's an incredible rate. For some context, Katherine Hepburn batted around 27.3% (12 nominations, 44 roles) and Jack Nicholson is at 20% (12 nominations, 60 roles). Except for some one-off nominations or special cases like James Dean* (2 nominations, 3 roles), no one is even close. So, yeah, she isn't nominated for everything, but excuse me for wondering how she was snubbed for her work in Stuck on You.

*Side tangent: That guys worked a lot. Between 1951-1956, he has 31 roles, mostly in TV.

It's no surprise that Florence Foster Jenkins is another one of those Oscar nominated roles. After Ricki and the Flash and Suffragette went unnoticed, the law of averages dictated that another one was coming. Also, it's actually pretty hard to sing that badly consistently when you actually can sing well (I'm told. I'm more of a counter-point for that). She's wonderfully oblivious. Hugh Grant is sweet. You believe he cares for Florence deeply, although there's always a question about how much of this is because she's wealthy. Simon Helberg is delightfully nervous. It's a silly character that only works because of his commitment to it. Those three actors/characters hold up an otherwise unimpressive movie. I'm not a big fan of farce unless it's done at a very high level, and this relied heavily on the farce of Florence being oblivious. I appreciated some of the smaller character moments, but the rest didn't do much for me.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend