Judy

One of the most successful films, The Wizard of Oz was the film that made its child star famous, and yet by the age of 47 Judy Garland was dead, just a few months after a season at Leicester Square’s “Talk of The Town” club. This film, which stars Renée Zelwegger in the title role makes the dramatic connection between Garland’s early success at the age of 16. Although the film opens with studio head Louis B. Mayer telling the young Judy (Darci Shaw—incredible) that she’s got a special opportunity that most girls of her age don’t have, even though most girls who watch the film will be prettier than her. He goes on to explain specifically how she isn’t pretty, but she has a voice.

And so we move forward to the version of Garland at the time when she was forced to work in Britain. Her two children with Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell) are with their father (the troubles of their marriage are pretty clear) and Garland is not able to get work in the USA. In order to earn enough money to be able to be with her kids, Judy is offered the London job, with Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon) producing.

Nothing of the eventful life between—the films and the addiction and loss of money—is dramatised but the Judy of this film is devoted only to her kids, and to her audience. She is enormously congenial on stage and the audience loves her. In London she meets two men at the stage door and has dinner at their home: the film plays a fairly subtle tribute to Garland’s status as a ‘gay icon’ and refers to the recently repealed obscenity laws. 

The film goes back to Oz on several occasions and we see that Judy is being carefully controlled by the studio to which she was contracted: her diet and her behaviour were always under scrutiny. In her film’s present she meets Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock) and he becomes her fifth husband. She’s asked by Bernard Delfont’s doctor if she’s taken anything for depression. “Five husbands… didn’t work.” Jessie Buckley plays Rosalyn Wilder, who was looking after Garland during her concert season, and whose memories have been included in the film and the play on which it’s based.

This is all very similar to Stan & Ollie, and is also a British film, which seems to provide an alternate perspective on the glitz of Hollywood. The same doctor says that what he admired about Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz was how she took care of her dog. The dog isn’t shown in the reconstructed Yellow Brick Road set, but for trivia enthusiasts Toto was played by a female brindle Cairn Terrier called Terry, for which she was paid more than some of the actors who played Munchkins: $125 per week. When Terry got injured on set another dog was briefly used but Terry lived on, and her owner changed her name to Toto and wrote a biography…

The Hollywood Studio system was all about money, and probably still is. The Louis B. Mayer of this film looms disgustingly over the story because of Harvey Weinstein and others, but the glamour they sprinkled on the young Garland clearly affected her entire life, and the adult Garland rails against the system, often drunkenly. The London concerts were often chaotic and Delfont had Lonnie Donnegan (John Dagleish) waiting to play instead.

Not knowing much of Judy Garland’s life may seem like a hindrance to enjoying this film, but you would be missing out on what’s surely one of the best performances of the year. Renée Zelwegger, who has dealt with adverse publicity in a way that wasn’t open to Garland, is sublimely terrific. She has proven herself in musicals on film with Chicago but this is a long way ahead of that, comparable to the work of Jane Horrocks in Little Voice but still with more. He embodies the fragility of the woman and delivers the powerful vocal turn as well as the well-practiced sarcastic barbs. It seems like Zelwegger’s critics really became enraged when the actress won an Academy Award for Cold Mountain but to be honest she deserved it for Jerry Maguire and Down With Love, and her performance in the Bridget Jones films is technically brilliant—even though the films aren’t everybody’s cup of tea and media obsession with appearance are kind of redundant when the title character is obsessed with that very thing. In any case, the Best Actress Oscar is most likely going to go to Renée Zelwegger for this film, and if it goes to someone else then obviously there’s going to be a very good performance by someone else that we’ve got to enjoy.