'Judy' A Review

Judy is a biopic about actor/performer/entertainer Judy Garland played by Renee Zellweger. The film opens on a young Judy on the set of Wizard of Oz being harassed, manipulated, and abused by studio head Louis B. Mayor(Richard Cordery) it then flashes forward to 1969 where Judy is struggling to find work and take care of her two young children. Her ex-husband Sid(Rufus Sewell) moves to take custody of their kids and in order to make money Garland books a run in London where the majority of the action takes place with periodic flashbacks to her formative years as a child star.

Zellweger portrays Garland with honesty, energy, with periodic crescendos of theatricality and emotion. It's magnetic but the problem is that it is tragic bordering on the pathetic, exploitative rather than celebratory. This is a result of the material not Zellweger's performance. Her singing is good, she may not have the vocal range or grace of Garland but she makes up for it in her commitment and electricity. The problem is the sound mix of the various numbers, which are bizarre and uneven, at times Zellweger's performance is(or seems at least) diegetic, sometimes she is lip syncing, other times she seems to be lip syncing to a voice not her own or her voice auto-tuned to a point beyond recognition. The unevenness isn't a result of her singing but a result of the various ways the numbers are cut up and patched together.

There are some good turns in the supporting cast- Sewell, Dan and Stan played by Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira, Burt the band leader played by Royce Pierrson- but there are also some duds too Finn Wittrock as Mickey Deans Garland's young love interest struggles for watchability let alone believability(he is titanically outclassed onscreen by Zellweger) and Jessie Buckley as Garland's London handler who does so little her presence serves only as a place holder.

The major and glaring issue is with how the story is framed and how it plays out. In this film Garland has no victories, other than an incredibly striking and unfortunately brief sequence with gay couple/super fans Stan and Dan, she simply suffers. She is in the miserable grip of her addiction the entire film, honestly portrayed by Zellweger and perhaps true to history, but so what. This is the story of Garland, her impact and her legacy, and it is not served by the depiction of protracted pain. The scene with Stan and Dan is really the only one that shows her profound impact as an entertainer and only in the last seconds of the film to we get a sense of Garland's need-to and joy-from perform/ing. That is her legacy, her body of work and her lasting influence, not the pathetic and torturous realities of her drug addiction and alcoholism.

The film fails because it portrays Garland as a tragic figure not a human being. It examines and exhumes her misery but fails to show her impact as a performer and as a person.

Don't See It.