Who is Judy Garland? Young people, of course, will not know it from the hall attendants, but it is certainly known among the cinema's deep, especially the golden or classic Hollywood era that started during World War I until the late sixties.
Who knows Judy Garland will remember one picture of her is Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz in 1939; but few who remember Garland's 1960s, a woman who is addicted to pills and intoxicants, and lives self-destructive spells, and as a result has lost her singing power.
Garland, the 60s who accepted a five-week singing performance in London, was a shadow of her earlier strong image prevailing in the 1940s and 1950s. Six months after the London show, she died due to an overdose of sleeping pills.
For this film, titled "Judy", which starts today in the country, deals with its biography. The English director, Robert Gould, in cooperation with the text writer Tom Edge, who quoted the text from Peter Quilter's play "The End of the Spectrum", focused on early 1969 and the Judy struggle (René). Zellweger is against herself and her art in the last moments of her life spanning just 47 years.
A nightmare and a bleak tone
The film puts forward a hypothesis backed up by the facts, namely, that the shattered woman we see in the late 1960s is the product of abuse that she suffered in her childhood. To illustrate this, Gould provides the movie with retrospective scenes for the studio shooting of her most famous movie, "The Wizards of Oz", where we see a 16-year-old young garland (Darcy Show) forced to go through a strict diet program by MGM director Louis B. Mayer.
Judy was forced to take steroids at breakfast time to give her energy and a hypnotic at night. The film implies that Judy has gained the habit of drug use as a result of this diet program, which is like Judy's habitation nightmare, and worried her for the rest of her life.
Judy’s life was not happy; this is reflected even in the movie’s bleak tone with the exception of some lyrical scenes here and there, most notably the song “Somewhere Over the Spectrum”, but - the film - highlights a clear and conservative view in expressing exaggerated emotions.
The movie starts in 1968, and we see Judy sing at the Palas Theater in New York with her two children (Lorna) and (Joey). Judy is a sincere mother, but she is not always able to fulfill her financial obligations as a mother, especially since her financial situation is in the bottom when she is in debt. She is kicked out of the hotel and forced to take her two children to the home of her ex-husband, Syed Lift (Rufus Sewell), and she is forced to accept London's lyric and financially attractive offer.
While she is there, her demons struggle and turn into a headache for the girl in charge of caring for her and overseeing her needs Rosalyn Wilder (Jesse Buckley) and the owner of the nightclub called "Talk of the City" Bernard Delphont (Michael Gampon).
Judy communicates with Mickey Dunes (Finn Wittruk), a nice young man who listens to good words that Judy met in the United States earlier and falls in love with him later and marries him. For your information, according to the historical context of Judy's story, it was Mickey who found her body in their rental house in London.
An exceptional role
Zellweger carried the entire film undisputedly on her shoulders, and although it was released before the official Oscar season opened, she managed to put her name on the top actress nominations list. Zellweger plays an exceptional role in which she has been immersed in the character, and not only did she imitate Judy Garland.
In terms of physical appearance, Zellweger went through the experience with radical changes in her face and manner of speaking to the point that the actress watched films about Garland in order to absorb her physical language. Zellweger also trained with a voice coach to practice the sound layers of a real character.
The truth is, although we may see glimpses of Zellweger here and there during the film, the person in front of us on the screen is definitely Judy Garland. By curtailing the film's events to London's journey only, Judy avoids the pitfalls of biographical films; most notably, he narrates many details in a relatively short time.
The film is neither short nor fast, that is, it is neither urgent nor pressured, but there are some sacrifices in such scenarios. First, large parts of Judy's life do not happen on the screen and are either ignored or remembered quickly. Second, the retrospective scenes related to "The Wizards of Oz" are so captivating that the viewer may wish the film to stay on longer. Third, Lewis P. Mayer would have been a perfect villain if he had stayed longer in retrospective scenes.
Or, let's say, if the entire movie was during the filming of her most famous film, we would have had another movie in which a victim and an evil one replaced the story of a shattered woman. Of course the story is stronger in this case, but that would not give Zellweger an opportunity to flex her muscles in performance.
Although Judy does not stick to the events in chronological order for the final months of the heroine, it provides the viewer with a touching story about the fall of one of America's lyric icons in the 20th century. The course of the story is very guessable, because the film material about drug and alcohol addiction is very familiar in cinema, but we return to the performance of Zellweger, and we say that although he was not legendary, but he is definitely strong, fun and beautiful, and it is the glue that sticks to the cracks of the many scenarios, which keeps the film Coherent.
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"Oscars" deserve
All the deficiencies of the scenario are completely covered in the performance and acumen of Zellweger who ran for her roles in "Brigitte Jones Dairy" 2001 and "Chicago" 2002, and she won Best Supporting Actress in "Cold Mountain" 2003, and she definitely deserves a victory for her performance as Judy Garland's character.
• Judy's life was not happy, and that was reflected even on the gloomy tone of the film except for some lyrical scenes here and there.
• 47 years old, Judy Garland has lived, and the work focuses on features of her biography.