So last night, I took my great friend Jewel Shepard to the Writers Guild Theater to see Renée Zellweger do about as good a job as humanly possible playing Judy Garland in the closing years of her life. They're already talking Oscar for her and it'll be a hard performance to beat…but there oughta be a little bit of Oscar Buzz (at least a hum) for Darci Shaw who plays Young Judy in flashback sequences. I think I know the answer to this and it's "no" but has there ever been a case where the Best Acting award and the Supporting award went to two people playing the same person in the same movie?
Judy is the story of Ms. Garland struggling to make a living and keep custody of her two children in the late sixties (she died in '69). I sensed a lot of factual fiddling. In an early scene that couldn't have been earlier than '67, she and her kids make a stage appearance for which she is paid a measly $150. True Fact: In July of '67, Judy did a two-week stint at the Palace Theater on Broadway and sold out every performance with scalpers charging top dollar for their scalpings. How do you go to or from that to playing a joint so small they can only pay you $150?
I don't know a lot about Judy's finances but I have a read a number of books about her life and I don't think this film told me one thing I didn't already know about her so very little in the movie particularly surprised me. I suspect what little did were all the contrivances of the screenwriter Tom Edge, or Peter Quilter, who wrote the play on which this film is based. This made a lot of the film tedious for me but we hung in there, knowing there'd be a great end scene and there was. I think I would have enjoyed the picture a lot more if I'd known less about Judy Garland going in.
One thing I liked: In the movie Stan & Ollie (which I seriously disliked), the famed British impresario Bernard Delfont was portrayed as kind of a boob. He pops up in Judy Garland's life too and here, he is more of a wise businessman, which from all I've read is much closer to the truth.
And of course, I liked Ms. Zellweger's performance, which is really the only reason to see the film and perhaps the only reason it was made. She lacks the magic of Garland's singing voice but I'm glad they let her sing instead of lip-sync to Judy because that always distracts. I'm usually not comfy with actors portraying well-known people on the screen but there are exceptions and this one of them.