I haven’t spent any time covering Meryl Streep’s latest film, Florence Foster Jenkins, but that’s not because I think the film looks bad at all. I actually want to see the film, and I think Meryl is pretty much guaranteed her twentieth Oscar nomination for her performance as the aging heiress who wanted to be an opera singer (and was gloriously terrible at it). I also think Meryl’s costar Hugh Grant might get his first Oscar nomination for playing Foster Jenkins’ common-law husband too. But I haven’t talked about this film at all because Meryl has been increasingly exhausting and I needed a break from her “we’re all Africans” and “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist” crap. Meryl covers the latest issue of WSJ. Magazine to promote the film, and I ended up enjoying the interview, despite the fact that there are zero references to Meryl’s controversial statements in the past year. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

The heart of Florence Foster Jenkins: “There’s that great Vincent van Gogh quote: ‘I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.’ That’s the aspiration.”

People who were fans of Jenkins: Cole Porter, Enrico Caruso, Barbra Streisand and David Bowie.

Watching Jenkins’ expression of vanity: “It’s also our prurient interest in other people’s vanity, imagining that it has nothing to do with our own.”

Jenkins loved to sing: “Her personal challenges, what was stalking her in her life, made her make a decision to live every second deeply, intensely and to her joy. To choose the one that chooses joy—and there are a lot of reasons to go and to explore the endless dystopian vortex into nihilism—is saying, ‘Music matters, love matters.’ What’s the value in being alive right now? It’s saying, ‘There is value.’ That’s in there.”

The Taste of Streep Instagram: “I don’t even know what that means… People have too much time on their hands. We need to create more jobs!”

Why she keeps working: “On a certain level you don’t have any choice—you’re unhappy if you’re not doing it, so you’re compelled in a certain way. And if you’re lucky you can keep working. But everybody has troughs and dismal times—every single person. I remember as I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really. And all the evidence of other 40-year-old women at that time—this is 27 years ago—would lead you to believe it was over.”

Her anxiety with this film: “My biggest anxiety was that I couldn’t sing as high as she did. She hit an F above high C. Do you know how high that is? It’s just insane. Florence sang in a particular way—I mean, the way she went wrong was particular to her. It didn’t really have rhyme or reason to it. A real person, a real diva, doesn’t sing the Queen of the Night more than twice a week, ever. And I was going to sing it three or four times a day. That was very hard. I actually lost my voice.”

[From WSJ. Magazine]

I ended up being strangely moved by the WSJ. Magazine write-up of the film, and I really do think that this will appeal to younger people – this is a story of how a woman with no real talent for opera became a “viral” sensation before things were even really considered “viral.” People would play Jenkins’ recordings at parties just to laugh at her, but… she sort of got the last laugh, because she got to live her dream. Here’s the trailer:

Photos courtesy of WSJ. Magazine, WENN.