“I just want what everyone else wants,” an ageing Judy Garland croaks to a BBC interviewer in the winter of 1969, “I just seem to have a harder time getting it.”
This is where we find Renee Zellweger’s Judy at the start of the film: gone is the wunderkind of 1930s MGM; Garland is now broke and in a constant state of inebriation. In order to earn enough to regain custody of her children, she is obliged to perform a series of sold-out shows at London’s Talk of the Town club.
Zellweger is resplendent in this biopic of a woman with credible claims both to the throne of the most talented entertainer of the twentieth century and that of the most damaged.
Firstly, her physical transformation is phenomenal. Every sinew of her being resembles Garland: the uneasy pout, the gaunt cheekbones, the (usually spaced-out) dark eyes peering through a decade’s worth of mascara. But it’s Zellweger’s physicality that elevates this performance above a mere feat of prosthetics and make-up. One second we are watching her limbs flailing like a rag doll during a stirring performance of For Once in My Life, the next we are in her dressing room as the same body slumps over a lonely cigarette. The extremes combine to create a portrait of a woman which feels at once respectful and brutally honest.
Zellweger is brilliant. Fantastic, she shines as brightly as the light bulbs around Garland’s backstage mirrors, with an emotional nuance that’s characteristic of her deep acting intuition. But the film falters in her absence. The supporting cast seems irrelevant: lazily drawn and largely immaterial to the plot. Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira play a Garland-adoring gay couple and are almost aggressively charmless. They fall short of their potential as much-needed comedic relief in a generally bleak film, while failing to make a statement about Garland’s status as a gay icon. The ability to miss not one but both of these notes is actually fairly impressive.
Jessie Buckley plays Judy’s very English assistant, Rosalyn Wilder. The obvious talent she brought to Wild Rose (2018) is, in Judy, as clipped as her character’s vowels. As if to cap it off, the final scene is overwrought and misses Garland’s trademark joyful campness, opting instead to be tiredly saccharine.
Whilst the more cynical could dismiss Judy as a star vehicle for Zellweger, the sheer veracity of her performance makes it worthwhile. Despite weak writing and uncompelling support, watching Judy’s face and voice vibrate with an unflinching love for performing has to be one of the most iconic cinematic moments of the year.
