Loving Judy.

There are fans of the artist and her art and there are fans of the gruesome spectacle of a celebrity falling apart in public. Fans of the art find their greatest pleasure in the recovery, the reassurance that the gift is still intact and powerful. We want Judy at the top of her game. Carnegie Hall, not Talk of the Town. But our love is not a completely pure love — we have some kind of love-adjacent relationship with the downfall, too, with the bottoming out. It’s necessary for the comeback. Part of loving Judy Garland has to be loving her ability to dig herself out of a deep hole and triumph, over and over, again and again. We follow her struggles, our hearts are heavy with her sorrows, we worry for her, and then that small, sad, terribly exposed woman summons some kind of Herculean strength and walks out on that stage and fucking nails it. For us. We love her, in some part, so intensely because we know how badly she needs us to love her.

But the other fans, the ones who honestly can’t even tell the difference between the artistry of Judy Garland — one of the greatest vocal talents* of all fucking time — and Renee Zellweger’s caterwauling,** and so don’t, either, make any distinction between tabloid photos of Judy, drunk and disoriented, and tabloid photos of Britney Spears, bald and drunk and disoriented. Or tabloid photos of Amy Winehouse, disheveled and falling down, or whoever. Each one is an “OMG did you see her??” moment of thrill at witnessing someone who was at the very top — worshipped and adored by millions — laid low.***

For some reason, to see a person humiliated, broken, mutilated, dead, obliterated, is a human urge. We slow down to see a body in a bag loaded into an ambulance, we love a perp walk or someone losing their shit in a McDonald’s, we click on a video of someone being shot or stabbed, we stare at crime scene photos of corpses in puddles of blood, we love the ending of Bonnie and Clyde, when they’ve been riding high for two hours, getting away with it, and now we want to see them fall out of that car, riddled with machine-gun bullets, and hit the dirt in slow motion. 

But the difference between the two films, Judy and Bonnie and Clyde, is hopefully obvious. Bonnie and Clyde is complex, compassionate, original, provocative. The lurid ending is not there just to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust, it’s about the audience’s bloodlust. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting about Judy Garland’s harrowing last weeks, that there’s not material there for an interesting film, an honest film, even a monumental film. They could have made a great movie about the public’s fascination with Judy’s worst moments instead of making a film that just revives and sustains it. But Judy is a paint-by-numbers biopic that even by the low bar of its genre was mediocre.

*She’s also one of the greatest actors, a fact that gets lost because of the force of her singing talent. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to watch Zellweger “do” Judy Garland. Zellweger is talented but I just kept thinking that if you gave that role to Judy she would blow Renee out of the water and make the film seem much better than it is in the bargain. 

**Judy Garland’s many performances of Come Rain Or Come Shine are some of the best among hundreds of extraordinary performances of a great artist. (Lucky for us and for the future, it was recorded for her TV series.) Zellweger’s performance of Come Rain Or Come Shine in Judy is, well, I love Renee Zellweger so I’m just hoping I will eventually forget it and move on.

***Again, I want to say that I’m a fan of Rene Zellweger, and I’m thrilled to see her make a comeback of her own, but there’s something gimmicky and cynical about casting her as Judy, the queen of comebacks, making her final comeback among so many.