Judy (2019)

(In French, On TV, August 2022) As someone who has become a bit of a classic Hollywood buff over the past decade, I was both looking forward and dreading Judy. The story of Judy Garland, after all, is one of the most powerful object lessons in Hollywood child exploitation. As a teenage star whose actions were controlled by the then-dominant MGM movie studio, Garland soon found herself trapped in a cycle of fame, drugs, neglect and unhealthy romantic relationships, torpedoing her career through substance abuse, chronic lateness and unreliability. She aged more quickly and visibly than virtually any other Hollywood star—to the point that any film of hers past the mid-1940s is often difficult to watch given that she looks a decade or two older than her real age. Judy picks her story up in 1968, less than a year before her death—she’s having trouble finding a place to stay with her kids, and one string of gigs in London looks like an ideal way to get her life back on track. Meanwhile, flashbacks (featuring the adorable Darci Shaw as younger Garland) detail the abuse and influence of MGM in her life. In the film’s latter-day chronology, Garland is played by Renee Zellweger, and this is one instance where Zellweger’s weird physical transformation over the 2010s serves her well: she looks too thin, too wrinkled, too battered and so a far better fit for Garland than Bridget-Jones-era Zellweger could have been. (I’m not convinced Zellweger deserved the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, but Hollywood loves both a comeback story and a celebration of its past glories, so that feels more understandable than most.)  While the screenplay does a credible job at dramatizing and compressing Garland’s issues in a short period of time plus flashbacks, there are times when it slips inelegantly—as much as paying homage to Garland’s gay audience was a good idea, the film stops dead in its tracks for a highlighted pro-gay-love message that seems to diverge from its own themes. Other moments aren’t necessarily more subtle, but that comes with trying to give a dramatic structure to events that didn’t necessarily have one. While the rage in biographies in the moment is to take a specific period in time as indicative of an entire life, anyone can make a good case that Judy Garland deserved a full-life treatment—the compromise here isn’t necessarily satisfying. But what it doesn’t get in moments, Judy generally succeeds in aggregate: it’s a story about a little lost girl who could have had a much better life away from the spotlight of fame.