Judy

There's been a movie about Judy Garland kicking around Hollywood for years and it finally got made with Renee Zellweger playing the lead role. While the film, directed by Rupert Goold, is a standard show biz biopic, it elevates to something special whenever Zellweger struts her stuff. Since she's in every scene of the film, that's pretty much all the time.

Judy centers around an engagement of shows she did in London around Christmas in 1968. She has been kicked out of her hotel in Los Angeles, leading her to leave her two smallest children with their father, Sid Luft. She can't get an agent, but the Hippodrome in London is eager to book her. Reluctant to leave her kids, she goes, and the result is a harrowing, nightly event to see if she'll actually go on or not. When she does, of course, she knocks 'em dead, except when she's too drunk, gets heckled by the crowd, or passes out mid-song.

Judy is framed by flashbacks to when she was filming The Wizard Of Oz, and she is introduced to a regimen of pills--one to keep her awake, another to put her to sleep, another to suppress her diet to keep her slim. She is told by Louis B. Mayer, a god-like figure, that she can be a normal person, marrying and having kids or getting a job as a cashier like any other girl, or she can use her voice to become a star. She takes the devil's bargain.

Like Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland seems to have lived a life crafted by a novelist. With a steady diet of pills and booze, she didn't seem destined to live a long life, and was pretty much a passive person while others about her destroyed her. This film takes an empathetic view, and anyone with a heart will be choked up at the end (guess what song she sings at the finale?)

There are certainly liberties taken. I'm not an expert on her life, but a quick look at Wikipedia tells me the relationship with her fifth husband, Mickey Deans (played by Finn Wittrock) was not the whirlwind courtship it appears here--they knew each other for a few years before marrying, and they did not meet at a party in Hollywood. I also have to wonder at the veracity of a scene in which Garland meets two men at the stage door, signs autographs for them, and then hangs out with them all night, ending up at their flat for eggs. The scene is key, though, because it shows how important Garland was to gay men--it was her death, after all, that was the tinder spark for the Stonewall riot.

But back to Zellweger. She doesn't look like Garland, and she can't help but be far too robust (I found a clip of Garland on Johnny Carson in 1968 that shows how frail and prematurely-aged she was) but no matter, Zellweger takes the screen and holds it with a firm grip. She does her own singing, and there are several songs that show off her skills, and therefore Garland's. I don't doubt that she was pushed on stage, in her mind unable to do it, and then burst into song like a trouper. But Zellweger nails the quiet moments as well, the resolute need to have her children (a scene with Rufus Sewell, as Luft, is scintillating--he asks for full custody and when she says, "Over my dead body" a chill goes through one).

The other cast are good, too, especially Jessie Buckley as Garland's "handler," which couldn't have been an easy job. Goold's direction isn't anything special, but he does the right thing by letting Zellweger just have moment after moment. She is certainly the front-runner for the Academy Award right now, deservedly so.