Based on a stage play, The End of the Rainbow, Judy starring Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland takes too many falls. This biographical film, directed by Rupert Goold, is relatively innocuous.
Its maudlin theme is that this woman, an astonishing movie star (Judgment at Nuremberg, A Star is Born (1954), Meet Me in St. Louis, The Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade), singer and entertainer whose alcoholism and drug addiction killed her by age 47, was doomed. But Judy is neither dramatized at the proper depth for the caliber of its subject nor does it accomplish a successful depiction of Garland, who married several men including Vincente Minnelli and Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) and mothered three children, all portrayed here.
Judy’s mixed success is not necessarily Zellweger’s fault. She’s a fine actress with a good record. But she’s either been misdirected, misguided by the script or ventured out of her league playing Garland, whom Zellweger portrays in fragments. Just when you’re willing to go along with the depiction, and there is both resemblance and success in her performance, an overly mannered tic or expression betrays the actress and you’re out of the movie. Judy is telescoped in flashbacks and her final London stage engagement, so end-stage career acts are portrayed. Zellweger (Chicago), singing in her own voice, hasn’t got the pipes.
Domineering movie studio types, a tracheotomy, attempt at suicide, custody battle with Luft over the two kids, poverty, a crush on Mickey Rooney and the chronic need stemming from the child star’s damaged ego to gain intimacy with an audience; all of these, much of it happening off screen, drive Garland’s addiction to drugs and booze. A party at daughter Liza’s, who’d go on to face similar struggles, leads to another marriage to another man that needs and doesn’t satisfy Judy. Addiction’s vicious spiral gets its due.
Judy doesn’t give Garland her due. It’s possible to make a late life movie about her without depicting her in her finest vocal form. Yet Judy gets bogged down in too many disparate segments without any single theme. Her London engagement, for example, becomes the focal point for her swan song, Judy suggests, leading to a climax in which she gains some deeper form of audience bond. This would’ve been more effective, however, with better seeding through exposition.
Oddly, Zellweger’s created more of a smaller-scale caricature of the maudlin caricature that’s been the mainstay of the gay male adoration than a convincing portrayal of a real-life falling star. There are finer moments, especially with a gay couple in an arc that nicely cashes in on the best of Judy‘s subplots and themes. Jessie Buckley (the fireman’s wife in Chernobyl) has a lovely turn as Judy’s main contact during the London show. An actor named Finn Witrock (La La Land, TV’s The Normal Heart) plays one of the men who becomes one of the husbands. Michael Gambon is fine, too, and Judy looks and sounds terrific.
Judy Garland deserves something either deeper or lighter than Judy. This is because something about her stardom and demise has been lost, very, seriously lost and fouled up, since she self-destructed. A scene in which her doctor, giving her an injection as he admits his childhood admiration for her portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, gets at what this movie needs and lacks.
After skimming the surfaces of her sordid past, which is all Judy ultimately does, he urges her toward proper self-care, an idea rooted in egoism which is only, very rarely properly practiced let alone properly understood. Liza Minnelli, whose thoughts on her mother are very serious, deep and profound, lives and talks as though she gets what egoism means. So does Elton John. Both are addicts and survivors, for the moment, and, like Judy Garland and others such as Whitney, Elvis and Amy Winehouse, they’re stars whose ability radiates.
Judy, to paraphrase the poem that, if realized, gets and keeps you clean and sober, hasn’t the wisdom to show the difference.
Hollywood’s first remake of William Wellman’s searing 1937 tragedy, A Star is Born, neither enhances nor detracts from the original. Director George Cukor, working from Moss Hart’s screenplay (based upon the original script), mixes music into the story, which remains essentially intact. If this sounds clunky, so is the remake. A Star is Born (1954) lacks chemistry, characterization and cohesion. It’s a star vehicle for Judy Garland and by now everyone knows about that legendary wreckage. It’s impossible to watch this and not think of the real life tragedy of Judy Garland’s life.
Indeed, known facts undercut the theme. Knowing what one knows about Garland and her abused, molested, drug addicted life trivializes what might have been a great motion picture. Hart, Cukor and Garland were extremely talented. Others, such as co-stars Jack Carson, Charles Bickford and James Mason as an alcoholic movie star who discovers Judy Garland’s Esther Blodgett, also have ability. They’re lost in a movie that’s constantly doing to its star what it’s dramatizing as destroying its leading man. The incessant push and pull of publicity, promotionalism and working an artist too hard — before the ends of Marilyn, Elvis and Whitney, to name a few — lies beneath the surface of Cukor’s colorful extravaganza, in which there’s too much Judy Garland performing too many songs, few of which advance the plot.
This is the primary problem with 1954’s introspective version of A Star is Born, which, as rendered here, glamorizes suffering, the opposite of the thematic purpose of William Wellman’s stunning portrait of what moves the movie star. The lights of Los Angeles glimmer in the distance of this picture, as spotlights suddenly pierce the dark night’s sky—and the audience is plunged into Hollywood as a circus of posers.
“He’s here — he’s drunk” introduces the fading movie star known as Norman Maine (Mason) before the show thrusts the audience into chaos.
Enter Judy Garland as the song and dance performer who coaxes the drunken fool offstage — she comments to her bandmate that, drunk or not, Norman Maine seems nice. The problem is that he’s not nice — and Jack Carson as the studio’s publicity chief and Maine’s babysitter, knows it — and Cukor’s extended setup makes Mason’s Maine too vile and disgusting to redeem.
Ditching an integral hometown subplot from the original, this approach robs the remake of its reason for being. A Star is Born goes right into Esther Blodgett’s makeover into Vicki Lester without sufficiently establishing what’s there to make over.
The stars do their best to play the romance but they never get the screen time to show how deep is Norman Maine’s and Vicki Lester’s love, so there’s lacking the sense of their desperate need to get away from show business. Maine molests and cavorts at will. Garland’s Lester is a musical powerhouse, if a maudlin powerhouse, and 1954’s A Star is Born is too much her movie. After he hunts her down following the opening debacle, he hears her sing without an audience, pledges to make her a star and tells Esther Blodgett to sing “for herself”, which she proceeds to do after admitting that her inner state is confusion and that she feels most alive when she sings.
Vicki Lester and the movie too abruptly dispense with the man who believed in her. In nested stories within stories depicted in Vicki Lester’s songs, which go on and on in an entertaining if detached and meaningless montage — at one point, she sings about being melancholy, which displays pure melancholy — A Star is Born dims its glow.
Even after her character sings about a new world opening up to her, as Norman Maine’s finally released from the burden of being Norman Maine, her response is more song and dance. That she does this in a dazzling display which tickles her man is fine. But it casts her character adrift and reminds that audience that the movie exists to serve Judy Garland’s musical numbers, not the other way around. This renders her “new world” star ignorant. When she gets a smack in the face, it is not shocking.
Love is not enough to stop someone wonderful from ceasing to love himself, it turns out. That Judy Garland of all actresses realizes this in her big meltdown scene, foreshadowing Malibu’s winds of change and a robe on the rocks, as James Mason writhes in agony at the wreckage of his life, ought to have underscored the line that a disowned self fades with “not with a bang but with a whimper”.
Instead, this overproduced A Star is Born, putting a troubled, fading star at the center of a film about reclaiming life, flickers the illusion that suffering can be glamorous — forgetting that it superficially seems that way until it happens to you.
Author’s Note
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