This weekend, two familiar tales featuring 2019 Oscar front-runner performances opened in theaters: Joaquin Phoenix’ Joker and Renee Zellweger’s Judy. They might have well been titled this way as the performances trump the overly familiar storylines.
Judy Garland’s journey from child star to addict to tragic icon is unfortunately a story we’ve seen many times with other musicians, actors and artists. It would take amazing direction to warrant the time spent to watch this sad decline play out, and director Rupert Goold (Macbeth, King Lear) did not give us that. Even worse, he used multiple cliché flashbacks to hit audiences over the head repeatedly with the obvious, well-known history of Judy’s dependence on pills. A simple, non-flashback hint of it would have been fine.
Judy chronicles Garland’s 1969 engagement at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub and Zellweger finds the right balance by channeling the older Garland, not impersonating her. Her opening club number, By Myself, is dynamic and dazzling and her later takes on Get Happy and Somewhere Over The Rainbow speak more about Garland than any of the scripting.
Judy is adapted from a play (End of the Rainbow), and it shows. The movie is just a vessel for a knockout performance by Zellweger. It’s a pale cracker to her hot dip.
In a nutshell: Zellweger is an over-the-rainbow knockout, the film is not.
Award potential: Zellweger will be the front-runner for Best Actress in all races including Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG. She has previously won the Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Cold Mountain (2003).
The Ten Buck Review. It’s the female performance of the year and half enjoyable, but I can’t fully recommend a tragic movie on an acting performance alone. Not worth ten bucks.