Direction: Rupert Goold
Country: UK
Under the direction of Rupert Goold (True Story), Renée Zellweger (Nurse Betty; Chicago; Bridget Jones’s Diary) has a golden opportunity to catapult her acting gifts to a new high, playing the famous American singer/actress Judy Garland with determination. Tom Edge was in charge of the script, adapted from the play End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, which focuses in the months that led to Garland’s death in 1969.
Overwhelmed by substance abuse and the absence of her children, who decided to stay with their father - the businessman Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell) - Garland heads to London in order to reissue a depreciating career with a five-week stint at the restaurant/nightclub Talk of the Town. Standing between an enormous talent and a crescent lack of confidence due to emotional instability, Garland’s shows toggled between brilliant and disastrous.
Despite her fifth marriage with the much younger Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), the star of The Wizard of Oz kept struggling with sadness and loneliness, to the point of inviting a male gay couple - complete strangers yet true devotees of her work - to dinner. Over the course of the narrative, there are multiple flashbacks that allow us to understand Judy’s traumatic childhood as a pills-fed vaudevillian under the wing of Metro Goldwyn Meyer’s intimidating producer Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery).
Typical biopic procedures are found in a film that, just like its main character, is emotionally wobbly. Despite giving an idea of Judy’s personality and late life difficulties, this compassionate dramatic piece never punches hard. In place, it merely caresses faintly. Zellweger is the one who saves the film from the most terrible defeat.
