Judy

seen on 16 October 2019

Rupert Goold directs Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland, with Rufus Sewell as her third husband Sidney Luft, Finn Whittrock as her fifth husband Mickey Deans, and Jessica Buckley as Rosalyn Wilder, her PA during her final London tour in 1969.

The film deals with Judy's incipient deterioration during her 1969 performances at London's 'Talk of the Town' nightclub, one of her many attempts to overcome her financial difficulties, here made plain at the beginning of  the film when a Los Angeles hotel refuses to let her and her two children by Luft stay due to unpaid bills. There are also flashbacks to Judy's teenage years when she was under the oppressive 'guidance' of Louis B.Mayer and her ambitious and unsympathetic mother, plied with pills to control her appetite and to help her sleep at night.

It's a sorry tale of abusive exploitation, in which the normal development of a teenager is thwarted both physically and emotionally by powerful people who want to keep the child in a pre-conceived mould to maximise profit. The long-term effects are all too plain in the desperately needy adult, beset with inner demons and unable to free herself from alcohol and drug dependency even though these have a disastrous impact on her ability to perform. Sometimes the shows at the nightclub are a barnstorming success, but at other times the audience turns hostile when she is late and apparently drunk.

The film concentrates on Judy's own dilemmas, with everybody circling around her - the staff wary of her moods, Sidney Luft weary of the discord between them, Mickey Deans at first dazzled and later disillusioned and even vengeful when things go sour. As  nod to her status as a gay icon, there's an episode when two devoted fans find themselves entertaining her in their flat: whether or not this actually happened, it is a classic part of a sentimental biopic, especially in a story with a general trajectory towards disaster.

Renée Zellweger gives a convincing performance capturing many of the mannerisms of the famous star, though occasionally the portrayal is perhaps too self-conscious. The contrast between the private and public self is well-marked, and indeed the performance numbers capture something of Judy Garland's amazing stage presence when she was in good form. Unlike older film treatments of famous but troubled celebrities, constrained as they were by the dictates of various film censorship boards, in this film Judy as a character is not sanitised, but the film is not really groundbreaking.