Judy
Rupert Goold (2019)
The unhappy story of Judy Garland is well known. As a screen performer, she sometimes exudes such emotional fragility that she’s uncomfortable viewing: aware of her real-life tragedies, you can’t help feeling is Garland is expressing herself rather than another character. This combination of factors makes you wonder if a Garland biopic is intrinsically surplus to requirements but there have been two American television dramas about her life, as well as three stage shows[1]. Among the latter, the best-known is Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, first staged in 2005 and now the source of Rupert Goold’s cinema film, inventively renamed Judy and with Renée Zellweger in the title role.
Following the increasing trend of screen biopics (and Quilter’s play), Tom Edge’s screenplay focuses on a particular period in Garland’s life – her time in London in late 1968 and early the following year, a few months before her death (in June 1969). There are also flashbacks to her days as a child star in Hollywood (only a few but still too many, since they all make the same point: that she was appallingly exploited and abused). The early scenes of the film are also set in America. Judy, with her two younger children Lorna and Joey (Bella Ramsey and Lewin Lloyd) in tow, fails to check in at a hotel where she still hasn’t paid the bill for the last time she stayed. She has to take the children to the home of their father Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell in a bald wig), the third of her four ex-husbands. When an agent tells Judy she’s still sufficiently popular in Britain to make good money there, she heads for London. She takes up an engagement at the Talk of the Town to clear her debts. Lorna and Joey remain with their father in America.
Viewers of Judy familiar with Ronald Neame’s I Could Go on Singing (1963), Garland’s last cinema film, may experience a sense of déjà vu or, at least, of life imitating melodrama. In both cases, the protagonist drinks too much, is anguished at her failure to be the mother she wants to be, and has a vocal problem that requires the attention of a medical specialist. Unfortunately, the screenplay for Goold’s film is even more primitive than the I Could Go on Singing script, perhaps because it’s technically a factual account so imaginative shaping is considered unnecessary. We keep seeing Judy, moments before a scheduled performance, in no fit state to perform – and her increasingly exasperated minder Rosalyn (Jessie Buckley) trying to get her charge on stage in one piece. Even allowing that this repetition is meant to convey the vicious circle of Judy’s final decline, the routine becomes boring.
The film’s idea of imagination is an icky subplot that thinks it makes sense simply because Judy Garland is a gay icon. After the show one night, two middle-aged men at the stage door ask for her autograph. Judy’s feeling so lonely that she does more than sign; she asks the pair, Dan (Andy Nyman) and Stan (Daniel Cerqueira), if they’d like to go out to eat. They incredulously, rapturously agree. There’s nowhere open in the early hours of the morning so Judy comes back to the couple’s flat, where Stan fails abysmally to cook an omelette. It turns into sub-scrambled eggs; Judy tries to rescue them but the result, to her amusement, is still barely edible. Stan then falls asleep on the couch. That’s right – someone whose lifelong idol has miraculously decided to spend a short time in his humble abode, dozes off while she’s still on the premises. Why? To make it easier for Dan to tell Judy that and why he and Stan missed her last London show. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was still in the future and Stan was in prison.
Renée Zellweger has one of her more likeable moments in the early part of this episode. Judy laughs as she lies how delicious the eggs are: you get a real sense that she feels among friends, unusually safe. But the scene is gruesomely over-extended: when Dan tells her about Stan’s imprisonment, Judy makes clear that she knows just what it’s like to be a victim. Worse is to come in the finale. By now, after passing out on stage and being barracked by the audience, Judy has ended her Talk of the Town run. Lonnie Donegan (John Dagleish) has taken over. Judy makes a surprise appearance in the wings to ask Lonnie if she can go on before he does, for just one number. He agrees, she takes the stage and sings ‘Over the Rainbow’. Halfway through, she breaks down and can’t continue. In the audience, Dan and Stan gamely take over, everyone else joins in and Judy receives a standing ovation. Rupert Goold’s presentation of the Talk of the Town punters is perfunctory but has the virtue of suggesting, probably quite accurately, that plenty of those who’d paid to watch Garland in her midnight shows were drunker than she was. That might seem to justify the crowd singing of ‘Over the Rainbow’ but Goold is aiming for a more uplifting effect – a kind of clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies moment.
It takes a lot of talent to do what Renée Zellweger does in Judy but she left me cold, for several reasons. For a start, her performance comes across as a flat-out Oscar bid (and, worse, will probably be a successful one). Next, Zellweger looks wrong, in ways flattering to herself. Middle-aged Judy Garland was an odd figure, an apparently bulky trunk on relatively long, shapely legs. Zellweger is thoroughly svelte: slumped on a chair in her hotel or dressing room (as Judy often is), she slumps elegantly. Her taut slenderness suggests not the ravages of drugs or drink but time spent in the gym. Whereas Judy Garland seemed unable to mask her feelings, Zellweger’s squinched up face amounts to a protective layer. As far as the songs go, I admit I’m hard to please. I think it would have been a copout for Zellweger to lip-sync to Garland recordings and applaud her for doing her own singing. As we know from Chicago, she sings very well. But her virtuosity here comes at the expense of authentic vulnerability: you rarely feel she isn’t singing chiefly to impress. That goes for her acting too. Renée Zellweger is conspicuously in control even when she’s illustrating Judy’s loss of control.
For the most part, Rupert Goold lets Zellweger sing a song, or at least most of a song, through – that’s certainly preferable to having more numbers but only in bits. In most respects, though, Goold’s direction is feebly unimaginative. There’s rarely an interesting shot of people in relation to one another within the frame. When two characters are having a conversation, Goold prefers a ping-pong of close-ups on their faces as they deliver or react to lines. Primarily a theatre director, Goold successfully translated his stage hit King Charles III to television in 2017 but he didn’t impress with his first cinema feature True Story (2015) and Judy seems a step backwards. His occasional attempts to inject movement into proceedings are pointless: they seem to show that the wrecked artist protagonist is actually in good physical shape (as the actress playing her evidently is: an impression Zellweger also gives doing ‘The Trolley Song’). Judy walks down what seem miles of corridor to get to the stage of the Talk of the Town. Sid Luft comes over to London; they meet in a pub, have a row, and she rushes out, sprinting down an alleyway and onto the street to hail a cab. Worst of all is Goold’s mania for reaction shots. He consistently gets his cast to define their facial expressions in a way that makes some perfectly good actors look bad.
Judy is a one-woman show that leaves you feeling sorry for the supporting players, who also include Finn Wittrock, as Judy’s last husband, Mickey Deans, and Michael Gambon, as Bernard Delfont, the man behind Garland’s Talk of the Town season. (Biopics are certainly making clear the enduring force that Delfont was in the post-war entertainment industry: last year, he was masterminding Stan & Ollie‘s 1950s British tour.) Wittrock is OK but the script takes an unkindly dim, crude view of Mickey. He’s portrayed as an opportunist who, once his business plans for Judy in America fall through, disappears from her life (which isn’t what happened). Michael Gambon, looking his nearly eighty years and unwell, seems far too old for Delfont. It’s not the only puzzling piece of casting. The presence of Jessie Buckley, in a weak, non-singing role (in a film about a singer), is chiefly frustrating. The same goes, in his much smaller part, for John Dagleish (who was Ray Davies in the stage show Sunny Afternoon). Dagleish doesn’t remotely resemble Lonnie Donegan or get the chance to sing or play a note. The one convincingly felt performance in the support cast comes from Adrian Lukis, in his brief appearance as the voice specialist doctor.
The Hollywood flashback scenes are hopeless, though this isn’t the fault of Darci Shaw, the teenage Judy (and physically righter than Renée Zellweger). The problem, rather, is that Rupert Goold doesn’t decide if he’s after cartoon horror or something more real. As a result, Louis B Mayer, as interpreted by Richard Cordery, is neither a flamboyant monster nor calmly lethal: he’s just blah. Whether or not the world needed a cinema biography of Judy Garland, it certainly didn’t need Judy. The only positive is that, now we’ve got this Garland biopic, it’s bound to be a while before there’s another.
16 October 2019
[1] The total doesn’t include TV or theatre pieces in which Garland is a supporting character in someone else’s story.