the ungluing of hollywood stars
by
Douglas Messerli
Tom
Edge (screenplay, based on the 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 death of former star 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, or another hero of both film and Broadway, Cole
Porter, in the 2004 film De-Lovely (which nearly everyone except for
Howard, me, and Charles Bernstein hated) who fell into compulsive gay sex, losing his wife and his legs. And there are truly dozens of others.
Fame and success are gleefully brought
down in these Hollywood standards, each performed by quite powerful stars
themselves: Gloria Swanson, James Mason, Kim Stanley, and Kevin Kline. Predictably,
you need a star to portray a star, even if all of these remarkable people also
seemed to also decline after playing their larger than life figures.
Yet, the one thing all of these movies
had in common is that they showed or hinted at (in the case of Nora Desmond) the
reasons they rose to fame. In each of these films there was an arc, even if
just imagined, of how they had become such legends, which, in turn, made their
falls even more tragic.
Not so with the movie I saw with Howard
the other day in celebration of his birthday. Judy, directed by Rupert
Goold, which simply presumes we all know why Judy Garland is so important—and
except for brief passages of her encounters with Louis B. Mayer (Richard
Cordery), a young somewhat look-alike of 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.
Garland might be said to have chosen men
with whom to have affairs and marry were the very people who helped bring
her down. The list was long: Artie Shaw (who later eloped with Lana Turner), David
Rose (who at the time was married to Martha Raye, but whom she later married),
songwriter Johnny Mercer, and even Orson Welles (married at the time to Rita
Hayworth). Her husbands and later lovers, who included director 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, for the English performances
at Talk of the Town—portrayed in this film by Jessie Buckley—described Garland’s
death a few months after at the singer’s young age of 47:
And to be 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 and
go, “Go away!” It was like
rubbing salt into a wound. She
didn’t need that. She thought
she did and she didn’t.
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 most lovely of the movie, a point where the great legend crashes down to
meet up with the city in which she is 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. It is like going on a
tour of the world in which she has become out of touch, which allows her to fly
back to Kansas once more.
So 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 wish 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, and alcohol,
and just the human abuse of her talent.
In fact, this movie might have been a
disaster, given its sort of pedestrian presentation—despite the lovely costumes
by Jany Temime and the basically beautiful set decorations 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 musical interpretations. Yet, here it doesn’t matter. Zellweger is another
kind a 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 vision
transforming Judy Garland’s sad 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 of 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, 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 year.
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; I might never have imagined Zellweger as being such a
figure. But she certainly has proved me wrong.
Judy
is as much about Zellweger as it is about Garland. This actor has now become a
legend of her own.
Los
Angeles, October 6, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (October 2019).
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