Another Comeback for Judy—and Renée

In reviewing Judy Garland’s 1967 Palace concert engagement, Vincent Canby called her a “sequin-sprinkled female Lazarus,” referring to the mercurial superstar’s uncanny ability to resurrect her career and revive her legend again and again. Judy Garland is back; another triumph for the comeback queen, the tabloid headlines would scream throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

Fifty years after the star’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills, the Judy Garland mythos lives on. The new biopic Judy (2019) introduces the iconic entertainer to a whole new generation of moviegoers. And in the title role, another talented star, Renée Zellweger, reinvents herself. 

She has dazzled us before, but it’s been quite a while. Who can forget her sparkling turn as Roxy Hart in Chicago, her unconditionally loving support of Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire, or sporting that absolutely perfect British accent as Bridget Jones? She’s been nominated for three Academy Awards, and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as a feisty southern Civil War spitfire in Cold Mountain. 

But by around 2010 Zellweger’s career had fallen on hard times, and her attempts to age gracefully (almost impossible under Hollywood’s merciless glare) with some cosmetic procedures and Botox were met with well-publicized ridicule and scorn. She fell off the A-List and seemed destined to fade away, no longer a bright new star but a cinema footnote. (Even her recent foray into Netflix as the deliciously glamorous and ruthless soap opera villainess of What/If? failed to gain her much good buzz.)

Miss Zellweger in What/If? (2019)

Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland? Quite a stretch, I thought, when I first read that the she was going to essay the part.  But I was wrong. She had me at hello.

Zellweger’s remarkable performance is something to see, as the actress crafts an astonishingly detailed characterization of a lonely, troubled lady who’s down on her luck and at the end of that fabled rainbow, forced to sing for her supper and to support her family despite a serious addiction to prescription drugs.

Desperately ill, still possessing a definite but no longer reliable talent (a tracheotomy has damaged her vocal chords), Zellweger’s Judy struggles to succeed in summoning the old magic for her London audiences at the Talk of the Town supper club in December 1968. 

Zellweger is simply sensational in the role, acting and singing up a storm in a tour de force that allows an operatic range of triumph and tragedy as Judy’s rollercoaster ride of a life reaches its final downward spiral.

An uncanny transformation

In the 2001 miniseries Me and My Shadows, Judy Davis (who won an Emmy Award) had lip-synched to Garland’s own voice, expertly mimicking the singer’s trademark gesticulations, but Zellweger takes the homage to the next level. Yes, she does her own singing, but that’s just the beginning. Like a skilled Method actor, the actress inhabits and embodies each song, organically finding the emotional truth of each gesture and musical phrase with an intensity that evokes the Garland magic without imitating it, finding and tuning in to the frequency of Garland like a spiritual channeler. The musical performances are nothing less than supernatural, and match the intensity of the dramatic scenes.

Thanks to Judy, I truly believe Renée Zellweger will have to make some room on her mantelpiece next to that Cold Mountain Oscar. She certainly deserves it.

As Garland’s fifth husband, the ambitious Mickey Deans, Finn Wittrock lends strong support and displays great chemistry with his costar as he tries to hustle a business deal for the fading superstar. Rufus Sewell is perfect as ex-husband Sid Luft, achieving dramatic sparks in a couple of heated exchanges with Zellweger.

Painstaking detail is paid to Garland’s makeup and costumes, including the glittering Travilla pantsuit she appropriated from the set after being fired from Valley of the Dolls as well as the Ray Aghayan gowns (cocreated by his business and life partner Bob Mackie) from The Judy Garland Show. In Judy’s clothes, Zellweger is even inspired to subtly reference Garland’s famously sloped-shoulder stance, a result of scoliosis—hence Louis B. Mayer’s cruel nickname for her—“My little hunchback.”

With Finn Wittrock as Mickey Deans

The film itself is not perfect, nor is it historically accurate. Supposedly based on Peter Quilter’s stage play End of the Rainbow, the screenplay veers pretty far from its source material to begin with, and then plays a bit fast and loose with the facts for dramatic effect. Only Garland scholars like me will quibble at the artistic license taken here. Examples: Joey and Lorna are far younger in the film at this point; they were actually both teenagers by 1968. Mickey Deans and Judy never split; he took care of her for the rest of her life—she died a few short months after the Talk of the Town engagement, in June 1969. (Deans wrote a memoir, Weep No More My Lady, chronicling their relationship and Judy’s final year.)

The relationships with her young London assistant and musical director are composite characters (well played by Jessie Buckley and Royce Pierreson) of many who had to endure Garland’s out-of-control drug addiction and fits of temperament—most vividly recounted in the 2015 memoir Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me by Stevie Phillips. 

The male couple who welcome a lonely Judy into their home for dinner is another fanciful creation, perhaps based on the fact that Judy and Mickey Deans were indeed befriended by a gay couple who lived next door to them in their tiny mews cottage outside London. (After the Talk of the Town engagement, Deans and Garland made England their home base as they continued a mini tour of concerts in Europe to keep the wolf from the door.)

Garland was not fired from her Talk of the Town job by manager Bernard Delfont (played flawlessly by Michael Gambon)—though she did come close. But the truth of the Talk of the Town performances and key events are well dramatized here, including Judy’s often slurring performances, one of which did indeed result in the an appalling incident of having food thrown at her, the old vaudevillian cliché come true. 

The dreamy flashback sequences of MGM, tyrranical Louis B. Mayer, stage mother Ethel (whom Judy always called the “real life Wicked Witch of the West”) and the filming of Wizard of Oz are not meant to be literal but seen through the veil of memory, and their themes ring true—Judy as commodity, the self-esteem crushing studio servitude to MGM—but couldn’t the producers have found a more exciting actress to play the young Judy? (By contrast, Tammy Blanchard had been stunning as the young Frances Gumm in the Judy Davis miniseries, winning the Best Supporting Actress Emmy Award.)

A faithful reproduction of a Judy Garland Show gown by Ray Aghayan

All criticism aside, the apex of the film is Zellweger, and she carries it with powerful aplomb and raw courage, owning a role that most performers would shy away from attempting—a woman believed by many to be the greatest entertainer who ever lived. Thanks to Renée, Judy lives on in yet another triumphant comeback tale, and both actresses’ stars are once again on the rise.

“Comeback? What comeback?” Judy once remarked wryly. “I’ve never been away!” And Renée can say the same thing as critics now proclaim, “Renée is back, in a big way!”