Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland, hoarse, brittle and still able to hold a room, is the whole reason to watch. Rupert Goold’s film is tidy and well-mannered around her, and its flashbacks to the MGM years keep explaining what she has already shown us.
Rupert Goold’s film takes the last year of Judy Garland’s life, adapted by Tom Edge from Peter Quilter’s stage play End of the Rainbow, and puts the whole weight of it on Renée Zellweger. She carries it. What she is carrying is a neat, well-mannered biopic that lays out the facts of a ruined woman in the right order and then reaches for comfort at every point where the story wants to hurt. Zellweger is the reason to watch, and she is a good enough reason.
She does not do an impression. The voice is lower and more ragged than Garland’s, the singing is her own and recorded live, and she is not trying to match the records. What she gets is the body: the shoulders up round the ears, the hands that never settle, a walk from the dressing room to the wings that looks as if it might not make the distance. When she reaches the microphone on the first night at the Talk of the Town and the band starts, we sat forward. We did not know whether she would get through the song, and the film, for once, did not seem to know either.
Ole Birkeland shoots the London scenes in brown and gold, hotel lamps and stage spots, with the club audience left as dark shapes beyond the footlights. Kave Quinn’s Talk of the Town is red velvet and small round tables, a room built to feel intimate from the floor and enormous from the stage. Jany Temime puts Zellweger in sequinned trouser suits that catch every light in the club and make her look smaller inside them. Gabriel Yared’s score keeps out of the way of the songs, which is the right call; the strings only swell between them, when the film is trying to persuade us of something.
The trouble is the flashbacks. The script cuts back to the MGM lot of the Wizard of Oz years, where the teenage Judy (Darci Shaw) is refused a hamburger, handed pills to sleep and pills to wake, and told by Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery) that she owes the studio everything. None of it is needed. Zellweger has already shown us a woman who cannot eat, cannot sleep and cannot believe she is loved; the flashbacks stop the film to explain her, and Melanie Oliver’s cuts land on cue, a pill in 1968 answered by a pill in 1939. By the third of them we were impatient, and we stayed impatient.
Around the star the cast is thin because the script has left them so. Jessie Buckley, as Rosalyn Wilder, the assistant whose job is to get Garland on stage, does a great deal with a clipboard and a series of pained looks, and the film’s best quiet scenes are the two of them in a dressing room. Finn Wittrock’s Mickey Deans is a suit with a smile; we never learn what he sees in her or what he wants. Rufus Sewell plays Sid Luft as a wall for Garland to shout at down the phone. Michael Gambon turns up as Bernard Delfont, delivers his lines in the voice of a man who has already been paid, and leaves.
One scene shows what the film might have been. Garland leaves the club with two fans, Dan (Andy Nyman) and Stan (Daniel Cerqueira), goes back to their flat and cooks them eggs. Nothing much happens. She asks about their lives, they tell her what her songs meant to them in years when it was not safe to say so, and the film sits still and lets Zellweger listen. It moved us more than anything on the stage did, because for ten minutes nobody in the flat was performing.
The finale we will not describe, except to say that it reaches for a lift the story does not support, and most of the audience we saw it with went along gladly. Goold has made a film that is decent to its subject in the way a good obituary is decent, and Zellweger has made something rougher and truer inside it. See it for her, in a cinema if you can, where the songs have room. It runs 118 minutes and carries a 12A.
