At Rainbow’s End
At the forefront of the Oscar conversation has been Renée Zellweger’s comeback performance as late period Judy Garland. Director Rupert Goold’s adaptation of the stage play End of the Rainbow follows Garland during a run of performances at London’s Talk of the Town, just months before her death. Like the best biopics being made these days, this film wisely doesn’t try to tell Garland’s story from cradle to grave, instead focusing on a key moment in her life, but it never coalesces into something special. Zellweger is very good as Judy, sometimes excellent, but her deeply felt performance is smothered in a mediocre movie.
The film flashes back and forth to Garland’s days as a starlet for MGM, when her weight was managed with fasting and pills, and her free time was nonexistent. She was the every-girl who was forbidden from acting like one. Some of these sequences work, particularly an opening scene of Garland and Louis B. Mayer on the set of The Wizard of Oz, but what starts as a welcome reminder of her tortured youth in that scene becomes a tired trope that distracts from an already unfocused present day storyline in 1969 London.
The one deeper insight gleaned from the contrast between Judy’s past and present is that what used to be a rebellious act of defiance, like refusing to perform, has transformed into a shrinking act. It’s not her fault that she’s dependent on drugs and alcohol, but too often we wallow with Judy rather than understand how she’s lived with it all these years.
The only real reason to see Judy is Zellweger, who does a fine job of playing a slightly sassy grand dame of entertainment, one that probably matches the real Garland pretty closely. Judy is about Garland’s hesitance to perform and the circumstances that brought her to that point, so her time confidently performing is relatively limited. It’s a shame, because that’s when Zellweger really becomes Judy; she approximates Garland’s late-60s voice well, and manages to capture much of the style and phrasing she used (at least to my untrained ear). It’s a little bit like listening to Liza Minnelli; you know it’s not Judy Garland, but damn if she doesn’t sound like her.
Zellweger deserves the praise she’s received for her performance here, I just wish the rest of the film was on her level.