![]() ![]() “Judy” tries hard to inject brightness and pleasure into this bleak picture as this lost, luminous woman grabs onto one last chance, one more man. Of course, in the end, there was no one to help and Garland died at 47 from an accidental overdose. She overdosed so often that her daughter Liza apparently acquired a stomach pump. Zellweger has a fine one - she sings all of Judy’s songs - but it can’t deliver the fantasy that this is one of the greatest entertainers in history.īy the late 1960s, Garland had made and lost fortunes, was addicted to drugs and had repeatedly attempted suicide and cried out for attention by threatening to do so, by cutting herself, swallowing aspirins. Wholly embracing Garland’s freneticism at its rawest might have registered as excessive or campy, but it would have deepened the portrait. The take is also cautious, too comfortable it never makes you flinch or look away. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. Mostly, “Judy” offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. The real Mayer wasn’t much taller than Garland, whose mother - missing in action here - was loathsome, details that might complicate the movie’s reductive vision of power and abuse, victimization and survival, women and men. Mayer (Richard Cordery), threateningly looms over her. ![]() She’s not supposed to eat and she can’t sleep, kept awake by pills pushed by a studio that thinks she’s too fat. Under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the young Judy is exhausted and hungry. Her larger story regularly surfaces in bland, unconvincing scenes of the teenage Judy (a miscast Darci Shaw) that drain attention and momentum from both the main story and Zellweger. This shift in emphasis to the Loving Mother is presumably meant to make Judy a more readily sympathetic figure who, in caring for her kids, is trying to correct the past. Instructively, Judy is pawing a lover’s crotch soon after the play opens, not worrying about her children. ![]() The movie, directed by Rupert Goold and written by Tom Edge, is a gentler, squarer mash note to the Great Woman that’s part maternal melodrama, part martyr story. ![]() “Judy” is based on Peter Quilter’s play “End of the Rainbow,” which had a well-received Broadway run in 2012 and skitters between Judy ripping her heart out in a London hotel and at the theater where she will become the talk of the town. She had been forced to sell her house in Los Angeles - fans and servants had been helping pay the bills - and had effectively become a vagabond, which is how Gerald Clarke describes her in his sympathetic book “Get Happy.” When Garland arrived in London in late December 1968, she was broke. One of those biopics that tries to encapsulate the sweep and substance of a life by narrowing in on ostensibly representative moments, “Judy” concentrates on Garland’s bumpy, weeks-long engagement at the Talk of the Town, a London cabaret-restaurant where patrons sometimes threw breadsticks at the faltering talent. Even so, Zellweger is solid in a movie that derives its force from its central mythic figure and your own Yellow Brick Road memories: the Hollywood supernova with the inner-child vaudevillian named Frances Ethel Gumm, a.k.a. The woman who remains out of sight, though, is the sadder, scarier Judy who threw a butcher knife at one of her children and threatened to jump out a window in front of another. In “Judy,” Renée Zellweger plays a few variations on Garland near the end of her life: worried mother, needy lover, disaster, legend. “Sometimes I do both,” Garland said, “at the same time.” Because, a friend replied, no one knew if she was going to sing “Over the Rainbow” or open her veins. Noticing Cavett’s fidgeting, she wondered why she made everyone so uncomfortable. One day in 1968, the year before she died, Judy Garland watched a television interview she had done with Dick Cavett. ![]()
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