Film Review - Judy (12A)

I just want what everybody wants. I seem to have a harder time getting it.

For me, as with most of my UK generation, Judy Garland meant a pigtailed girl in a pinafore, who spun over the rainbow in the family homestead on our TVs every Christmas Day. Judy references 1939 technicolour classic The Wizard of Oz right at the start, but deals much more with the grown woman who felt - with some justification - that she would never fly over that rainbow. Rupert Goold's new biopic is very much a tragedy, one that resonates due to an appropriately starry turn from Renee Zellweger.

In the late 1960s Garland is long past her heyday and her lucrative film career. She's trawling cabaret venues with her two younger children in tow, popping uppers and downers and trying to keep all three of them with a roof over their heads. With the threat of losing custody of the kids hanging over her, she accepts her agent's offer of a season in London's Talk of the Town night-club. But the demons that have plagued her since her child-star days follow her across the pond - compromising but never quite extinguishing her genius.

The film to which Judy is most strikingly comparable is Stan and Ollie, both dealing as they do with great performers living off former glories and struggling to make sense of their lives in a more mundane context than they were once used to. But where the Laurel and Hardy biopic was bittersweet, this true story is marinaded in pure sadness. The focus is on Garland's fading star, with her various movie triumphs alluded to throughout - both in the Oz production flashbacks where we see the malign influences that created such a vulnerable adult (mogul Louis B. Meyer does not come out of this well), and in the stage re-enactments of songs from Meet Me In St Louis or A Star is Born. It makes for a more cohesive and interesting portrait than the traditional 'greatest hits' biopic, in that we get a sense of an entire life, scars and all, through the prism of that life's final act.

Such a film stands or falls with the quality of its central performance and Zellweger has earned all the award nominations that will surely be rained upon her next year. It's not that she's totally lost in the role - anyone familiar with Bridget Jones will recognise certain Zellweger facial mannerisms creeping through - but the emotion runs deep and the mix of humour, fragility and star quality is quite intoxicating. It's the stage performances where she really comes into her own, however. Having already proved her vocal talents in Chicago, here she simply stuns, capturing how Garland transcended the misery of her life in those moments of inspired theatricality and pure talent. It's in these sequences that the movie's often gloomy colour palette transforms into the warmth and vibrancy of the Hollywood era that made the girl from Grand Rapids, Minnesota a star.

There are other glimpses of warmth here - including some with Garland's London PA Rosalyn (Wild Rose's Jessie Buckley) and her band leader (Royce Pierreson), plus one notable, if apocryphal sequence involving two of the entertainer's dedicated British fans. Director Goold brings a touch of class from his Hollow Crown Shakespearian TV dramas and on a technical level it's a slick, compelling experience. But for all that, and for the singer's moments of on-stage heroism, it's an unflinching and unsentimental portrait of showbiz damage and a life wrung out by the Studio System. Not awfully feelgood - but at least the songs zing your heart strings. And they're belted out the way Judy would have wanted.

Gut Reaction: The musical numbers are uplifting, the moments of friendship touching. And the rest rips your goddamn heart out.

Memorable Moment: Judy's unlikely new gay BFFs.

Ed's Verdict: 7.5/10. Zellweger embraces the triumph and tragedy of Judy Garland's life in a performance that's all her own. A beautiful but bleak portrait of fame and the terrible price with which it sometimes comes.