Film Review: JUDY

Renee does Judy. 

A complete nobody named Monica Castillo who has blue hair and is Hispanic (not that there's anything wrong with that), writing under the auspices of deceased film critic Roger Ebert, hated the film Judy. In her pouty review she trashes the directing by Britain's Rupert Goold and the acting by Renee Zellwegger, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her star performance as Judy Garland, as well as a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for the same, among others.

According to Castillo, a.k.a. Señorita Blue Hair, "Goold manhandles these scenes with poor directing, barely masking Zellweger’s noticeable lip syncing. Some of the shots during the performances are unforgivably atrocious, cutting Judy’s face out of frame so that she holds less than a third of the screen and the empty air hogs the rest. It feels like an artless attempt to seem deep." (By the way, I never saw any such scenes, so WTF?)

Regarding the star, the Señorita says,"Try as she might, Zellweger’s Judy never goes beyond an impression of the multi-talented artist; her all-caps version of acting fails to allow the role to feel natural." All I can say about that is, "Hogwash!"  You heard me, hogwash. Judy is a brilliant movie, superlative in every aspect of filmmaking. The sets, the photography, the costumes -- it's all dazzling.

But the superlatives must be saved for Zellwegger who literally becomes Judy Garland without any distracting makeup devices intruding into the story, like Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours or Gwyneth Paltrow's fat suit in Shallow Hal. It's just Judy Garland, alive again! Zellwegger does the singing herself, so give her extra kudos for that. And while her voice is certainly not equal to the haunting, angelic Garland's, it's certainly melodic and dramatic enough to remind you of the powerhouse that was Garland.

The busy script flips between Garland's earliest Hollywood years when she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and her 47th and final year on earth in London, after her worldwide star had faded owing to her outbursts cursing at the audience and collapsing onstage, drunk and stoned. Garland's alcoholism and lifelong reliance on uppers and downers, fostered at the age of 12 by studio moguls bent on wringing every last bit of talent out of her while staying on shooting schedule, eventually took their toll in the form of fewer job offers and eventual poverty.

It's an emotional film that's difficult to watch at several points. But I held it together, repeating to myself, "It's only a movie," until Judy's -- or rather Renee's -- final rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, sung in front of a huge audience, proved too much for me. I finally burst out crying bitter tears for a beautiful life lived so wrong at the hands of others: mean studio bosses who drove her like a dog, a series of husbands who mismanaged her money and left her destitute, and the harsh critics who called her "too fat" when she was a little girl and "too thin" when she was an anorexic adult on drugs.

And now along comes Señorita Blue Hair who didn't like the movie or the star's portrayal, the same one that Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, a critic we have all actually heard of, called "the best performance of the year."  I wonder, what have you done lately that we might remember, Miss Castillo?

 

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