Renée Zellweger underwent a full makeover for her role in Judy, transforming herself into the doomed stage and screen star, Judy Garland. The perky Zellweger peers through the heavy makeup and crow’s feet in early scenes, yet somehow along the way Zellweger disappears, leaving only Garland, careworn by then, her star dimming, her life unravelling. It’s a powerful performance.
Although heavily fictionalized, Judy traces the emotional contours of Garland’s final year, 1969. Her film career is dormant; she’s regarded as unreliable; alcohol and prescription pills have sapped her. Her young adult daughter from one of her earlier marriages, Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux), is about to become a star, but she has two young children in her care as the money runs out and the bills pile up.
While wrangling with ex-husband Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell) for child custody, she leaves the kids with him and accepts an offer for a series of well-paid London shows. Despite the reassuring clamor of paparazzi and fans, it’s not clear if she’s up to the task. Garland prefers not to rehearse, claiming the hall is “too damp.” She seems disoriented in the opening moments of her first night on stage, but the trouper takes charge. It’s on with the show—but for how long? The scenes in which she fails onstage are heartbreaking.
Adapted by British theater director Rupert Goold from Peter Quilter’s musical, End of the Rainbow, Judy adds dimension to Garland’s last months with a set of flashbacks to the production of the movie that imprinted her memory indelibly, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Played by Darci Shaw, young Garland is fed pills for sleep and pills to stay awake. The studio otherwise starves her to maintain that trim figure and poses her with Mickey Rooney in a date staged for the fan magazines.
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer spells it out for the girl. “It’s your job to give those people dreams,” he counsels in a paternal voice. Those people inhabit the dreary nowhere, the real-life Kansas of the imagination where the only future for a girl was to be a cashier, wife and mother. “Is that what you want, to be just a housewife?” he asks. Like Mephistopheles, the sweaty-palmed producer offers her the world, but the bargain proves hard.
Hollywood’s dream factory produced many unintended consequences. The machinery of stardom damaged Garland’s life yet enabled her to give dreams to a set of people Mayer probably never considered: gay men. Judy steps into Garland’s gay fandom when she is befriended by a London couple whose lives were somehow uplifted with Dorothy’s gossamer dreams of a future “somewhere over the rainbow.”
Zellweger fully inhabits her character in all her complexity. Flashes of anger give way to despondency, and pill-addled incoherence rises to lucid clarity in a life where flamboyance masks fear. And yes, that’s really Zellweger singing, capturing something of the desolation and yearning in Garland’s late-period voice.
