Film Review: Judy

Originally published January 15, 2020

Letterboxd is a site where film geeks (such as myself) can track what movies they’ve seen and when they saw them. On the website, The Wizard of Oz is by far the most-watched Judy Garland film; 174,000 people have logged it on the site. The next highest is 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis, with a mere 17,000.

Judy, the recently Oscar-nominated biopic of the late star, focuses entirely on her time working on Oz and her London residencies in 1969 just before her death. The decision to focus on these two periods makes a certain amount of artistic sense. The thrust of the film is spent in 1969, charting Garland’s final days, while the 1939-set sequences try to set up why Garland is what she’s like in 1969.

But the decision to focus on these two time periods leads to a problem: the film never goes from A to Z, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks. There’s no mention of 1954’s A Star is Born, her drug problems in the 1940s or 1961’s Judy At Carnegie Hall and the film neglects to mention the cause of her death at the end of the film.

This leaves most of the work filling in the gaps to Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland. She does what one can only assume is her best, but the script leaves her hanging more often than not. Zellweger portrays Garland as a broken woman who is ultimately just trying not to be forgotten, but the script never clues the audience into why Garland is broken. That’s a real shame because the real Garland is a fascinating person, but the script limits what Zellweger can do with the role.

Instead, the film buries her under a ton of makeup and calls it a transformation. It’s easy to see right through it, though. Zellweger never truly becomes Judy Garland. She comes close to the real McCoy and her singing voice is admirable, but it never matches the brassiness of Garland’s actual voice. Zellweger seems like, well, Renée Zellweger playing Judy Garland rather than disappearing entirely into the role.

Final score: 6.4/10