the ungluing of hollywood stars
by Douglas Messerli
Tom Edge (screenplay, based on the stage play End
of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter), Rupert Goold (director) Judy / 2019
Hollywood movie producers and directors love
displaying the ungluing of Hollywood stars. Witness Nora Desmond’s slow dance
into madness in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the drowning suicidal
death of Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, the rise and fall of the
Marilyn Monroe-like figure in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1958 film The Goddess. And
there are truly dozens of
others, to say nothing of the numerous bio-pics of theater
and film writers, lyricists and composers whose lives come apart for various
reasons on the screen. It almost seems like the film moguls’ and producers’ fantasy
come true, finally gaining the upper hand while they “suffered” in public anonymity.
Fame and
success are gleefully brought down in these Hollywood standards, each performed
by quite powerful stars themselves: Gloria Swanson, James Mason, and Kim
Stanley. Predictably, you need a star to portray a star, even if all of these
remarkable people also seemed to similarly encounter a decline in their careers
after playing their larger than life characters.
Yet, what
these three examples had in common is that they showed or at least hinted at
(in the case of Norma Desmond) the reasons the stars rose to fame. In each of
these films there was an arc, even if just imagined, showing how they had
become such legends, which, in turn, made their falls even more tragic.
Not so in
the movie I saw with my husband Howard the other day in celebration of his
birthday. Judy, directed by Rupert Goold, simply presumes we all know
why Judy Garland is so important, and—except for brief moments of her encounters
with Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), a young somewhat look-alike Mickey
Rooney, and her horrific mother, Ethel Gumm (Natasha Powell) constantly feeding
her daughter drugs to make her sleep and get her up—we get very few glimpses of
how this great legend reached her heights.
Accordingly, as a script this is a fairly moribund tale, based on Peter
Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow (which Howard and I also saw). These
are the final months in the life of this amazing singer, focusing on all of her
failures: drugs, alcohol, and the worst taste in men that one could imagine, particularly
if you are a heterosexual woman desiring normal sex.
Garland
might be said to have chosen men with whom to have affairs and marry that were
the very people who helped to bring her down. The list is long: Artie Shaw (who
later eloped with Lana Turner), David Rose (who at the time was married to
Martha Raye, but whom Garland later married), songwriter Johnny Mercer, and
even Orson Welles (married at the time to Rita Hayworth). Her husbands and
later lovers, who also included Vincente Minelli, Sidney Luft, Mark Herron,
Peter Allen (who later married her daughter, Liza), and Mickey Deans (portrayed
in this film by Finn Wittrock)—two of whom were gay or bisexual (Minelli and
Allen) and the other three whom she accused of beating her. As her British
handler, Rosalyn Wilder, liaison for the English performances Garland made at
Talk of the Town—a figure played by Jessie Buckley in the film—described
Garland’s death at the young age of 47:
“And to found like that [dead from a drug overdose]
by that ghastly Mickey Deans is just awful. We’ve had people here who have not
been well, but that was a big star and we could see how badly Mickey Deans was
treating her. You really wanted to get hold of him go, “Go away!” It was like rubbing
sale into a wound. She didn’t need that. She thought she did and she didn’t.”
Garland herself appeared to realize, as
this film portrays, that much of her audience was gay, who not only were in
touch with her heartfelt singing, but sympathized with her sexual mistakes. In Judy
Garland chooses, quite suddenly, to meet up with two elderly gay fans to go to
an impossibly late night dinner, which ends, after their failure to find an
open restaurant, with the three ending up back in their modest flat, where even
the omelet, infused with cream, doesn’t quite properly come together. Judy attempts
to scramble the eggs, but nothing succeeds—a metaphor, clearly, for her
inability not only to find a sexual equal, but her impossibility to find even
decent housing for her beloved children.
The bond
is an important one: the sense of great possibilities lost in a series of
systems which do not easily allow entry to outsiders, which Judy has now also
become. That scene is perhaps one of the loveliest in the movie, a point where
the great star crashes down to meet up with the city in which she not quite
certain she is in (at one point she questions on stage whether she is in
London, San Francisco, or New York) and to meet up with a couple of its
everyday citizens. In her grand tour of the world, she has grown so out of
touch with reality, that meeting up with these two men almost allows her to fly
back to Kansas once again.
Accordingly, this film about Garland’s last desperate attempt to regain
custody of her children, Lorna and Joey Luft, is basically a sordid affair, not
something one might to experience on the big screen. Garland was exhausted—even
if often personally energized by performing night after night—from the results
of throat surgery, drugs, alcohol, and just the human abuse of her talent.
This movie
might have been a disaster, in fact, given its sort of pedestrian presentation—despite
the lovely costumes by Jany Temime and the basically beautiful set decoration of
Stella Fox—if it weren’t for the truly exceptional performance by its
unexpected star, Renée Zellweger. Yes, at times her performance is mannered:
her quivering lips alone become a major subtext in this drama. But none of that
truly matters given her all-out commitment to her character.
Zellweger, superficially, looks nothing like Garland, and her singing is
not completely in tune with Judy’s tremolo and brilliant musical
interpretations. Yet, here is doesn’t matter. Zellweger is another kind of
Judy, or at least becomes another one. We believe her because we believe
in her acting, through the passion with which she imbues her character.
There are
certain impersonations which simply miss the mark. But Zellweger is no
impersonator, but a kind of shapeshifter, transforming our vision of Judy
Garland’s last months onto the screen. If she doesn’t win major awards for this
role, I would be shocked.* I’ve seen her performing many roles such as Bridget
Jones and Roxie Hart, both plumper embodiments, with great enjoyment; but
nothing ever prepared me to see her as I did the other day.
If her
singing was not up to Garland’s standard, it hardly mattered; she met her
material full on much as Garland did herself, plumping up her now very thin,
older body, to achieve great resonance. She convinced me that she was a frail
and frightened as Garland herself in her last dying days. Without Zellweger, in
fact, this film would have been forgettable; but with her constant presence,
she makes this a work to never forget. Films about great actors need great
actors, and although I might never have imagined Zellweger as being such a
figure, she has proven me wrong.
Judy is
as much about Zellweger as it is about Garland. This actor has now become a
legend of her own.
*Zwellweger won the Academy Award for Best Actress
for this role in 2020.
Los Angeles, October 6, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October
2019).
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