RENEE EARNS GARLANDS ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD TO RUIN
HALF a century ago, Judy garland died in London from an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She had been an addict for more than 30 of her 47 years.
Contrary to the lyrics of her most famous song, her troubles never did melt like lemon drops.
a few months before her death, she had headlined for five weeks at London’s Talk Of The Town nightclub, a run that summed up the rollercoaster ride of her extraordinary career.
garland could wow an audience with her stagecraft one night, and outrage it the next by showing up hopelessly drunk. She got standing ovations at the Talk Of The Town, but also a barrage of bread rolls.
Those concerts, intended to restore her financial security, are the focus of this compelling drama by Rupert goold, a British director better known for his theatre work. indeed, this film has its roots in a play, which is why it seems decidedly stagey at times.
Happily, it also has Renee Zellweger, whose previous visits to Britain in the service of art were to play Bridget Jones and Beatrix Potter. Completing an unlikely trio, her performance in the title role is truly spine-tingling.
We have lately become used — if you’ll pardon the pun — to garlanded music biopics. This year alone, Rami Malek bagged an academy award for his turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody,
while Taron Egerton received enthusiastic plaudits for his Elton John in Rocketman. ‘I’m still standing,’ he sang. Zellweger leaves them both standing. Somewhere over the rainbow, maybe there’s an Oscar waiting. That would be true poetic irony, for Garland never got one. The film starts years before the 1969 concerts, with the young Judy (Darci Shaw) being auditioned by MGM producer Louis B. Mayer for The Wizard Of Oz. ‘LB’ at first seems avuncular, but flashbacks reveal him to be a monstrous bully, ordering that his teen star be fiercely chaperoned and given pills to take the edge off her appetite. That’s what started her on the yellow brick road to self-destruction.
Three decades later, those destructive impulses have left her homeless, broke, dissolute. Yet the film portrays her as more sinned against than sinning, and pretty much entitled to her abundant self-pity.
‘I want what everybody wants — I just have a harder time getting it,’ she tells a British television interviewer.
Still, she has at least clung on to a waspish wit and is a devoted if unreliable mother to younger children Lorna and Joey.
As for the most famous of her offspring, Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux), we meet her only briefly, at an LA party where Garland first encounters a charming young entrepreneur, Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who later visits her in England and, disastrously, becomes her fifth husband.
There is humour as well as sadness in all this. The film has great fun with a pair of stagedoor Johnnies, a gay couple who adore Garland and simply want her autograph, only for her to ask if they fancy joining her for dinner since she has nobody else for company.
It’s a very funny scene, but also deeply poignant, and perhaps, in a wider sense, a timelessly eloquent comment on fame. A LONGER version of this review ran in earlier editions.