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Biographical movie can be difficult to pull off. There’s the frequent impulse to attempt to cram a subject’s entire life into a two hour running time. This often results in an unsatisfying movie that merely skims over an individual’s life story like a greatest hits record without delving too deeply into what made that particular person tick.
Far more common lately are movies that choose to focus on a specific time period in a subject’s life. It’s usually a particularly noteworthy moment in their lives that defines them as a person and may even reveal how they became famous or successful in the first place.The film Judy falls into the latter category, although it isn’t really representative of Judy Garland’s rise to fame and fortune. It has plenty of the fame part, as it portrays an extended stay at a nightclub late in her life when she was able to coast by on her talent and her reputation of one of the greatest entertainers of the twentieth century. It’s a little light on the fortune part, however, since Judy is forced to travel to London for this extended engagement with the hopes of reversing her financial woes and earning enough money to retain the custody of her two children.It’s loosely based on real life events in the last year of the entertainer’s life, when she did indeed perform an extended five-week stay at the Talk of the Town nightclub in London in 1969, a mere months before her death of a drug overdose. It’s the flip side of Garland’s early years when she was catapulted to fame as a teenager in her most iconic role as Dorothy in the classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939). Of course, many are also familiar with the troubled life Garland had following her incredible early success, and Judy bravely focuses more one the tragic side of these later years.Considering the emotional impact of her performances and the dramatic events of Garland’s life, it isn’t surprising to find the movie slipping a certain degree of melodrama into the proceedings. And yes, the film does occasionally lapse into moments of sentimentality that aren’t just an extension of the troubled entertainer’s larger than life personality. However, it’s all fairly well grounded by Renee Zellweger’s knock-out performance as Garland that blends all her character’s personality ticks and physical mannerisms into a portrayal that avoids blatant impersonation.It’s a doubly resonant performance considering Zellweger is portraying a performer who is staging one final comeback when the actress is making a bit of a comeback herself. Zellweger has only appeared in a handful of films over the past decade, and the actress apparently saw the movie Judy as a vehicle for a full fledged return to the big screen that draws upon her undeniable talents as an actress.At the same time, it’s also easy to see how the movie has a certain level of “Oscar-bait” atmosphere to it, a biographical movie that allows its central performer to be the center of attention and deliver a completely unhindered performance. Yet, Zellweger truly rises to the occasion here, fully inhabiting the role in a way that is both attention hungry and emotionally convincing at the same time.If only the film had retained its central focus on these later years, instead of falling prey to the clichéd tendency of trying to capture too much of a subject’s life. The potent scenes of Judy’s later life are interspersed with flashbacks to her younger years that attempt to show the origins of her personal dysfunction working in Hollywood and being fed a steady diet of pills as a substitute for a real diet. Unfortunately these scenes are as unconvincingly portrayed as Zellweger’s performance of her later years is convincing. The young Judy Garland (Darci Shaw) is portrayed as a simplistic victim figure that comes across more as an idea of a person than an actual human being. Meanwhile the villains in her life, like Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordrey), are equally simplistic characters, individuals that may have been a factor in Garland’s emotional dysfunction but are so exaggeratedly demonized here that they are equally unpersuasive as real people. These flashbacks completely neglect the complexity of Garland’s younger years, and unfortunately pale in comparison to the performance Zellweger brings to the table.It is then ultimately up to Zellweger’s central performance to save the film from itself, and for the most part she succeeds. Judy may not be the deepest investigation into the life of one of our country’s most beloved performers, but Renee Zellweger manages to deliver a stunning performance that helps overshadow the film’s most obvious flaws.Rated PG-13.