Judy: A faded rainbow

Judy (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, substance abuse, and profanity
By Derrick Bang

This film has moments — quite a few, actually — that are sublime, and not merely due to Renée Zellweger’s mesmerizing portrayal of Judy Garland.

Determined to revive her career with a cabaret tour in London, Judy Garland (Renée
Zellweger) bids what she hopes will be only a temporary farewell to her children,
Lorna (Bella Ramsey) and Joey (Lewin Lloyd).

Everything comes together during such sequences: Zellweger’s performance, scripter Tom Edge’s dialog, cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland’s framing, and director Rupert Goold’s equally sensitive handling of the supporting actors in a given scene. The results are both magical and (frequently) utterly heartbreaking.

If only the entire film could be so assuredly composed.

Such highlights aside, other portions of Judy feel clumsy and ill-conceived: particularly those having to do with Mickey Deans, Garland’s fifth — and most ill-advised — husband. Finn Wittrock’s boyishly giddy performance doesn’t feel the slightest bit genuine, and he tries much, much too hard. Wittrock appears to have been cast for his resemblance to the actual Deans, but that doesn’t get him very far.

It’s quite jarring to see such a false, tin-eared performance alongside Zellweger’s far superior work.

Judy is a distinctly British take on the iconic American film and music star. It’s adapted from Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, which depicts Garland’s on- and off-stage trials and tribulations during what would become her final series of live performances. She began a five-week cabaret run at London’s Talk of the Town restaurant on Jan. 14, 1969; the results were chaotic, unpredictable, disastrous … and occasionally incandescent, which is why the punters kept purchasing tickets.

That said, late-night cabaret audiences could be brutal; these are far from the refined patrons at concert hall productions.

Zellweger’s all-in portrayal is authentic enough to be frightening. This was Garland at the fragile lowest of low ebbs: twitchy and jittery, her head often bobbing like that of a terrified bird; rambling, dismissive and often incoherent, due to chronic insomnia; beholden to a constant cocktail of uppers, downers, sleeping pills and tranquilizers; and with far too much make-up applied in an effort to conceal a frame so emaciated that it appeared skeletal.

Plunged into financial ruin by mismanagement and embezzlement, the London tour was a Hail Mary effort to earn enough money to settle with creditors, and re-establish a lifestyle stable enough to justify her desire to retain custody of young Lorna (Bella Ramsey) and Joey (Lewin Lloyd): her children by former husband, producer and tour manager Sidney Luft (a sublimely understated Rufus Sewell, as persuasively authentic as Wittrock isn’t).

It’s clear, even from the beginning, that this happily-ever-after family fantasy won’t ever occur; Garland simply isn’t strong enough to overcome her demons. Even Lorna can see this, with the quiet sorrow of a child forced into maturity far beyond her years. The telling moment comes during a long-distance phone call with the girl: a scene both actresses play with heartbreaking intensity. Ramsey’s solemn little face is shattering: another terrific performance by the young actress who won our hearts as Lyanna Mormont, in television’s Game of Thrones.

Garland’s London “team” consists of handler/assistant Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley), theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon) and pianist/bandleader Burt Rhodes (Royce Pierreson). Between them, they struggle to encourage, cajole and prop up their unstable guest: day by agonizing day.

(Just in passing, all three are actual individuals who participated in the slow-motion train wreck that this Talk of the Town run became.)

I vividly recall the absolute terror experienced, while watching 2008’s Rachel Getting Married, when Anne Hathaway’s viciously toxic character grabbed the microphone during the story’s rehearsal dinner. Imagining what she was about to say was enough to send me into full-blown panic: a terrific — and rarely achieved — piece of narrative suspense and directorial finesse.

Well, this film has just such a moment, when an impatient Rosalyn literally shoves Garland onto the stage, for the show’s opening night performance. Cringing in my theater seat, I realized that all the oxygen had been sucked out of the movie theater. We collectively waited, frozen by five-alarm dread, as Goold and Birkeland held on this moment, while Zellweger fumbled for the microphone. And then …

… but that would be telling.

Buckley is quietly radiant: the epitome of British charm and sensitivity. Rosalyn’s initial distaste for her hapless charge quickly morphs into forbearing pity, once she understands the lifetime’s worth of cruelties that Garland has endured. Rosalyn’s touch and tone turn gentle, and Buckley makes her the ultimate compassionate ally … even if Garland is too far gone to perceive this, most of the time.

Gambon’s role is lamentably fleeting; we need to see more of Delfont, to understand why he’d even take a chance on such an volatile performer. Pierreson gets more screen time, and he achieves much with minimal dialogue and calculated expressions that speak volumes. We feel for Rhodes and his musicians, constantly forced to adjust, scramble and improvise, while following a star who refuses to rehearse, constantly changes her set list, and often just drifts into a confused vamp.

Ah, but when Garland truly becomes herself, the results are breathtaking. Zellweger — doing her own singing — is a similar force of nature, while delivering the iconic tunes. They’re mostly all here: “Get Happy,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “The Trolley Song,” “For Once in My Life,” “By Myself” and — of course — the one audiences wait to hear, each evening. The only song conspicuous by its absence is “The Man That Got Away.”

Daniel Cerqueira and Andy Nyman also shine as the woebegone Stan and Dave, two devoted fans who purchase tickets for the show multiple times, and always greet Garland afterwards, at the backstage entrance. Her impulsive decision to accept a late-night dinner invitation leads to the film’s most moving scene, as these two men — a couple, at a time when this was far from tolerated — are unable to express the impact that her music has had on their lives. 

But she understands, during a powerful moment that concludes wordlessly.

These weeks in early 1969 are intercut with sequences from Garland’s filmmaking childhood, where it becomes apparent that young Judy (Darci Shaw) was brutally controlled by Louis B. Mayer and his underlings. Richard Cordery’s handling of Mayer is chilling, during his imperiously condescending dismissals of Judy’s plaintive requests to be allowed some time to “be a regular person.”

The set-up of these scenes — the way Cordery towers over Shaw — is deeply unsettling, and Shaw is convincingly terrified; we expect her panicked, beating heart to burst from her chest. Cordery’s reptilian coldness veers just this side of sexual abuse, but it’s quite clearly emotional abuse: the controlling strictness that robbed Judy of her childhood, and destroyed her chances of ever becoming a functioning adult.

(When Garland was released by Mayer in 1950 — after that year’s Summer Stock — she was a shattered 28-year-old. She had made 29 films during her 15-year run at MGM, sometimes as many as four in a single year.)

Gus Barry isn’t nearly as convincing — during these flashbacks — as young Mickey Rooney, and this film badly short-changes the intricacies of their linked careers and “orchestrated” relationship.

Back in 1969, Gemma-Leah Devereux’s fleeting (token) appearance as Liza Minnelli is rather bewildering, during an insignificant party scene that serves mostly to introduce Mickey Deans. We expect her to play a larger role in what follows, but she never reappears.

That’s the major problem with Goold’s film: The whole is less than the sum of its noteworthy parts. At times, we’re moved to tears; at other times, the story just sort of … well … drifts.

Judy is by no means the first time Garland’s grim saga has been depicted. Andrea McArdle — Broadway’s first Annie — played her in 1978’s rather dreadful Rainbow; Judy Davis is far better in 2001’s vastly superior miniseries, Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. Zellweger now can call the role her own, but it’s a shame she wasn’t granted a tableau that matches her intensity.