I have a confession to make… I’m not a huge Meryl Streep fan. Stop the presses, I know. I don’t dislike her. I recognize her remarkable achievements and objectively I respect her performances, but she’s just not my favorite. So, it was with a bit of reluctance that I watched Florence Foster Jenkins… A wealthy heiress angling to become an opera singer despite no talent for it seemed dull at best. However, I was delighted. The rapid fire dialogue between Hugh Grant and Streep is a joy to watch and Simon Helberg as her awkwardly reluctant pianist is fantastic. The two most difficult things for an actor to convey well are intimacy and awkwardness and Streep nails it to cringe-worthy perfection. Some may criticize the film for its failure to commit to either being a comedy and making Jenkins the butt of jokes or a tragedy making Jenkins the object of our sympathy, but that in and of itself is a beautiful point. She is both and Streep does not make the mistake of pigeon-holing her. “People can say that I can’t sing, but they can never say that I didn’t sing.” Jenkins (and Streep) let us know that they knew exactly what they were doing all along.