Judy is Over-Hyped

Judy (2019)

Directed by Rupert Goold.

LD Entertainment, 118 minutes, PG-13 (drug abuse, language)

★★

Judy, the new biopic about Judy Garland (1922-69) has gotten a lot of attention, including Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Best Actress award to Renée Zellweger in the title role. Beware the hype. Judy is a classic case of a film that looks better than it is.

Rupert Goold is best known as a London theatre director and the script for Judy is based on Peter Quilter’s play, The End of the Rainbow. The film adaptation often feels more like a play than a movie; it’s a series of vignettes that stage live, but feel static and claustrophobic on the screen. The film stitches together flashbacks to Garland’s early days in Hollywood to set up the last six months of her life when she was broke, unstable, and forced onto the road.

Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm to vaudevillian parents. She performed with her two older siblings and the act’s name was changed to the more pleasant-sounding Garland Sisters. Judy signed with MGM in 1935, when she was just 13. We meet Judy (Darci Shaw) when she was 14 and filming The Wizard of Oz. Her relationship with MGM head Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery) would today have #MeToo up in arms. It wasn’t sexual, but Mayer used passive aggressive bullying to turn her into a studio puppet and diet pill addict. She remained hooked for her entire life. (Her death at age 47 was due to an overdose of Seconal and was perhaps a suicide.)

The film pivots around Judy’s 1968 performances in England. By then, Garland was a mess. She had married and divorced four times, battled third husband Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell) for custody of Joey and Lorna, and displayed narcissistic personality traits–including pill popping and heavy drinking–that chased away prospective employers. Luckily, she was still a legend in London, where impresario Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon) gambled he could keep a tight rein on Garland through threats and aide Rosalyn Wilder’s (Jessie Buckley) bird dogging. Good luck with that! Judy’s main accomplishment in London was to acquire another inappropriate husband, Mickey Deans (Finn Whittrock), an enabling huckster musician 13 years her junior.

The movie also depicts several touching encounters between Judy and two gay men, Burt (Royce Pierreson) and Dan (Andy Nyman). They are both composites and mildly anachronistic. Garland had a gay following, but her iconic status within the community–the Advocate once dubbed her “the Elvis of homosexuals”–mostly developed posthumously. Garand was not gay, but her brassy contralto voice and theatrical personality held appeal for voguing drag queens. (They were also drawn to other bigger-than-life personalities such as Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.)

Judy gets most of the details right; the problems lie with delivery, not content. Renée Zellweger has Garland’s mannerisms down pat: puckered lips and drawn-in chin suggestive of a pout, flights of destructive rage, furrowed brow, dramatic lipstick, sparkly pant suits, and her love of big production numbers. What she lacks is the voice. Zellweger did all of her own singing and she’s a surprisingly good vocalist, but she’s not Judy Garland! Believe me, I know. My father adored Judy; it was a rare Sunday in which I didn’t awake to “The Trolley Song,” You Made Me Love You,” “Over the Rainbow,” and other such standards. He also watched her TV show and every one of her movies that made it onto the box. I didn’t much like the music, but I certainly intuited that hers was a generational voice. Zellweger tries, but we can hear her laboring to reach notes that were child’s play for Garland. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Zellweger and Garland side by side.

Let me be frank; Zellweger has always been a second-tier actress in terms of ability. I saw nothing in Judy that made me reconsider. We notice the secondary cast more than Zellweger. Shaw is endearing as young Judy and Cordery is chilling as Mayer, whom he plays like Dick Cheney about to eat someone’s liver. Rufus Sewell deserves credit for transcending his thinly written character and imbuing Sidney Luft with more depth. Jessie Buckley is superb and eye-catching as Wilder. Fans of Game of Thrones might recognize Bella Ramsey, who plays Judy’s second daughter Lorna Loft; (She was Lyanna Mormont in GOT.) Gemma-Leah Devereux makes a cameo as Liza Minnelli, Garland’s daughter to Vincente Minnelli, her second husband.

I wish Hollywood would red-light entertainer biopics. In Hollywood’s golden age, actors created roles on the screen. These days it’s celebrities trying to inhabit the personalities of other celebrities–the difference between acting and mimicry. Zellweger might win an Oscar in a few weeks but she won’t make me love her.

Rob Weir