Beyond the rainbow

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This article was published 28/09/2019 (2434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She’s a Golden Age movie star past her prime, coping with addictions, serial failed marriages, money problems and the additional burden of caring for her kids amid all that personal drama.

That kind of subject tends to be treated unsympathetically. The temptation is to paint such a person as the author of their own misfortunes, brought low by hubris, or weakness, or an overall lack of character.

The movie Judy, a portrait of star Judy Garland in her final year on Earth, asks its audience to stow that prejudice.

It mostly takes place in late 1968 and early 1969, when Garland, having worn out her welcome on American stages, took her act to London, where she could still attract big numbers in the huge nightclub venue the Talk of the Town.

The film takes pains to contextualize Garland’s troubled later life with flashbacks to the year she made The Wizard of Oz for MGM’s Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), as heartless a mogul as ever chomped a cigar. Mayer not only bullied Garland, he also served as a prototype for Harvey Weinstein, surreptitiously groping 16-year-old Judy (Darci Shaw) with a gesture ostensibly intended to remind her where her heart was.

The additional grind of making the beloved 1939 movie was what started Garland on her journey of studio-sanctioned drug dependency. The flashbacks serve to remind us that Garland didn’t accumulate all that baggage on her own.

The film, adapted from Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow by Tom Edge, introduces us to Garland (played by Renée Zellweger) as a single mom doing her best to make a living, just 30 years after navigating the Yellow Brick Road.

Though devoted to her children — as a once-neglected child would be — she has run out of options. She places her two youngest children in the care of her ex-husband Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell), and arrives in London to perform a six-week engagement of sold-out shows.

After a bumpy start, she is overjoyed to connect with an American fan and promoter, Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), a handsome younger guy with big ideas about introducing Judy into the psychedelic generation. He is destined to become her fifth husband.

Directed by Rupert Goold (True Story), the film is modest in its ambitions when it comes to recreating the late ’60s milieu, or portraying any character other than Garland with any meaningful dimension. Goold very much relies on Zellweger to carry the movie.

And to her credit, Zellweger shoulders that responsibility admirably. She commanded the screen as murderous Roxy Hart in the 2002 musical Chicago, but this is an altogether different kind of performance. She not only pulls off a decent, albeit imperfect, impersonation of Garland, she must alternate between those brilliant knockout performances with depictions of crippling anxiety, exhaustion and intoxication.

Each performance scene has a layer of suspense — will she kill or will she bomb? — worthy of a Mission: Impossible set piece.

Fortunately, the film also has its grace note in an interlude in which the lonely Judy exits the stage door to find super-fans Stan and Dan (Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira), who have no factual counterparts in the story but rather serve as representatives of Garland’s gay fanbase.

It’s a lovely scene. They unsuccessfully go looking for a restaurant that’s still open and end up in the men’s shared apartment, where Judy and Stan commiserate over lives made difficult by the cold and uncaring. (The scene reminds one of the theory that Garland’s death in June 1969 fuelled the fire of the Stonewall riots one week later.)

Mostly, the movie leaves one feeling remote about it all. Some of the fault is in the eccentricity that creeps into Zellweger’s work, especially in performance scenes, where she adopts an off-putting glassy stare suggestive of a waxwork.

The final scene should be devastating, but it leaves viewers unsatisfied, longing for the emotional catharsis of, say, the 1954 version of A Star Is Born.

Maybe it’s just a prejudice. But sometimes, only the real Judy Garland will do.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing