If all actors were only allowed to receive one Oscar in their career, I firmly believed that Renee Zellweger (50) deserved hers for her portrayal of the title character in the romantic comedy trilogy Bridget Jones Diary. However, this was before I saw Judy, a gem of a film that illustrates the adult life of renowned and much-loved Hollywood star Judy Garland. Zellweger deservedly won her second Oscar for this film, for her ability to perfectly encapsulate and impersonate the life and soul of this simultaneously captivating, yet tragic musical figure.
As the film starts off, we are shown a snapshot of young Judy’s life, and the moment that her 16-year-old self was persuaded into taking her fame-making role as Dorothy in the 1938 classic The Wizard of Oz. What the audience sees, early on in this interpretation, is that Garland was convinced to choose a life of fame over one of normality, as all that was promised for a woman’s future at this time was to live as a housewife or a primary school teacher. What we can see is that she was sucked into the phoney life of the film industry for as long as she could remember.
We caught a glimpse of her teenage life: the constant feeding of pills to quench her hunger so that she did not gain weight while filming, sleep deprivation due to never ending rehearsals (one of which she had to endure 18 hours of, as was scripted), and inability to lead her own life, no matter how hard she tried to rebel in order to have fun, and to do her own thing: to live in the way that any teenage/ ‘normal’ human should be able to. The life she lived, in a nutshell, was inhumane, and her golden innocent teenage years were stolen from her.
Zellweger really showed here, for me, her true versatility as an actress, whilst also, as in Chicago (2002), her genuine musical talent. She successfully tugged at the audiences’ heart strings, particularly during the scenes where she was with her children: her insistent and desperate need to find work so that she could be fit to be with them, financially as well as physically, even though these choices to stay in the spotlight could continue to wreck her sanity.
Through an insightful and poignant journey, Judy is a film that reflects the true and raw reality of a film star’s life, in all its lightest and darkest of shades. It only continues to confirm how much image isn’t everything, and that there is always more to a person than meets the eye. The moral to this story is that we must remember that commodified stars are still humans, just like any other, and that all people deserve love, and respect. A film for which Zellweger, as I have already stated, deserves another Oscar, an award that would stand rightfully beside her Golden Globe.
5/5