Zellweger on song as fragile, ailing Garland
Judy Garland was 14 when her battle with diet pills started. She had no say in the matter. As Judy begins, she’s at the receiving end of a dressing-down on The Wizard of Oz set from Louis B Mayer (Richard Cordery), who was grooming her to be MGM’S new sensation. What he needed from her was – chillingly – discipline.
Fast-forward 30 years to the final months of Garland’s life in 1968, when she was ravaged, rake-thin, bankrupt and adrift in an alcoholic haze. It’s this Judy that Renée Zellweger embodies, if “embodies” is quite the word for this spectral, rasping, self-pitying figure.
Desperate for money after the implosion of her marriage, the idea was hatched for a comeback tour, playing in the city that had always received her with open arms: London.
This script aims to sketch Garland’s life with compassion, but it zooms in on the car-crash years with a tabloidy zeal. However, perhaps by default, the film highlights the imperishable bond between Garland and her audience. When she sings Over the Rainbow and falters halfway, the sequence becomes a communion between Garland and anyone her talent ever touched. Zellweger, with her valiant singing, seems to be in on this process: of course she can’t reach the soaring notes Garland did, but then even Garland was physically stymied at this point. An encore for her faded stardom isn’t quite the point: sketchy the film may be, but it finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.