Dazzling portrayal of ‘Judy’
JUDY
DIRECTOR: Rupert Goold
CAST: Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Rufus Sewell, Michael Gambon RUNNING TIME: 118 min CLASS IF IC AT ION:13DLV RATING: ★★★✩✩
ANN HORNADAY
THERE are movies that are great as cinema: examples of visual storytelling at its most inventive and emotionally expressive.
Then there are movies that are reminders that, for all the structural and aesthetic elements in a film, it’s the stars we come to see.
Judy is just such a dependable vehicle, carrying Renée Zellweger in a dazzling portrayal of Judy Garland at the end of her life.
Vulnerable, resilient and wrecked, Zellweger’s Garland both leans into the myth and slyly subverts it.
Zellweger doesn’t deliver an impersonation of Garland as much as an interpretation, adjusting her own vocal register but never to the point of erasure or mimicry.
The result is a straightforward slice-of-life biopic, bogged down with flashbacks and backstage histrionics, that offers a transfixing glimpse at the art of screen performance writ gloriously large.
Judy chronicles Garland’s you-had-to-be-there engagement at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub, where for five weeks in 1969 audiences were either in rapture or wondering if she’d make it onstage at all.
As the film opens Garland is broke, unemployable and uninsurable. Deeply in debt to back taxes, she leaves for England, where she can make a stab at refilling the coffers. Throughout director Rupert Goold leaps back to the time when the “fat-ankled, snagtoothed” Frances Gumm is being groomed to become a bankable child star, whether through the cruel manipulations of Louis B Mayer or the pill-pushing ambitions of her martinet stage mother.
“There’s the cake. Don’t eat it,” Mrs Gumm barks at a fake 16th birthday party thrown for her daughter.
By the time Zellweger’s character makes her grand London entrance, she’s addicted to pills and alcohol, a chronic insomniac and paralysed by self-doubt and stage fright.
Garland is so ruined that it’s all the more breathtaking when she proves she’s still got it. Zellweger’s opening number,
By Myself, is an absolute barnburner, a fabulous performance-within-apeformance that not only captures
Garland’s belting power, but her slightly glazed nervous energy and darting physical tics.
Zellweger bears zero resemblance to Garland in real life – contact lenses and wigs help, along with the familiar cigarette pants and embroidered cocktail ensembles – and her soft, high speaking voice is missing that distinctive, throaty sob. But when she takes the stage, whether at the top of her game or dissolving into a puddle of insecurities and defeat, she owns the role from the pipes right down to the gams.
The numbers in Judy are magnificent, with Zellweger more than holding her own on ripping renditions of For Once in My Life and Come Rain or Come Shine. But it’s the quieter moments that give Judy its depth.
Going beyond tragic diva tropes, Zellweger invests Garland with her own ferocity and focus, to the point where the technical commitment and strenuous physicality of the performance becomes one with the character’s own extraordinary grit and courage.
Playing Garland’s soft, unprotected centre as well as her sharp corners (“Judy Garland, born in a trunk,” she says gamely at one point) Zellweger isn’t delivering an homage to a worshipped icon, but to old-school Hollywood professionalism.
The ugly underside of that professionalism becomes the most recognisable motif in Judy, in which a teenage Garland has had her instincts so thoroughly destroyed she asks Mickey Rooney if they’re dating “so I’ll know how to look at you”.
The love flowing over the footlights might be addictive, but it comes at an unfathomable cost.