A. O. Scott, the NY Times movie critic, was right on the mark when he said in his review of “Judy” that the movie really wasn’t that great but that Renee Zellwegger had done such a star turn portraying Judy Garland that she was up there for an Academy Award for Best Actress. I would put it differently. Zellwegger doesn’t look like Garland, she doesn’t sound like her, and she doesn’t have her mannerisms, but she puts together a character which makes you think of Judy Garland, which is in keeping with what Zellwegger has said in interviews, which is that her aim was not to imitate Garland but to convey the emotions that went along with her. The movie itself, however, settles for the usual bio-facts about Garland. She was groomed by Louis B. Mayer to be a star, she took diet pills and sleeping pills from an early age and thus became a life-long addict, she was a car wreck in that she gave erratic performances and often didn’t show up on time, and the movie even threw in another part of the Garland legend, which is that she became an icon for her gay followers, all of these facts following from and in the service of an Achilles like dilemma to have a dazzling life as a performer even if it meant her personal life would be very rough, a pledge she did not regret until the end of her life when she preferred to see herself as a mother than as Judy Garland, the legend.
It is not easy to identify with Garland or even with that tragic choice. Garland is at once too weak and too pathetic a creature to allow us to see much heroism in her, and yet she is at the same time, in Zellwegger’s performance, such a wonderful performer that it is easy to put aside one’s misgivings. (In my memory, her performances in her later years were so heavy with mannerisms that they were off putting rather than triumphant.) As we learn from Sophocles, you don’t have to identify yourself with Oedipus in order to understand the nature of his plight as revealing something about the human condition: that people are unaware of how our lives double back on us and that we all meet our fates at the crossroads, this summarized by Sophocles in the image of incest which, as a classicist tells me, was just as offensive to the original audience of the play as it is today. What an audience does instead is to engage with the processes and situations in which the character is put and so for a moment suspend disbelief at not being in similar processes and circumstances. So, with Sophocles, we take on, for a moment, the weightiness of being a king: a decider rather than passive before events, just as for a moment we take on being a President or a Mafia Godfather, just so as to luxuriate in that world for what it is worth before going back to our own circumstances and processes as a teacher or a bourgeois homemaker or a tradesman. We can even imagine being Tevye the milkman because the music and the performance elevate him out of his rather humdrum life among hackneyed characters whom I, for one, find insufferable. Boy, would I want to get out of that shtetl, even with no pogrom! But it is alright to reside there for three hours, at least as long as you keep your distance, which is just what the artifice of playwriting allows.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t tear up at Tevye trying to come to terms with the romances of his three eldest daughters. He is disappointed, which makes sense because of his traditions, a concept invoked over and over again in “Fiddler on the Roof” so that it provides a connecting thread for what goes on, just as the duality of fate and engagement are the twin themes that Sophocles provides so as to understand the world of Oedipus. So, in a way, you are allowed to identify with characters even if they are not at all like you because the playwright is good enough to allow you into their world. I can even, for a moment, see the world from the viewpoint of Duke Mantee.
So how does Rupert Goold, the director of “Judy”, allow his audience you to do the same, to engage with Garland? He does so by engaging his audience with the day to day problems she faces as she navigates to get through her (not your) life. She tosses about sleeplessly; she has stage fright; she has to get a few bucks so she can manage a hotel room for the night for herself and her children; when she gets to London, she knows that she does not have to go over the music with her orchestra leader. These immediate issues or crises give both the texture of her life and its ongoing drama, and that is the same with all those other people in whom one takes up residence for a time. The same thing happens when you watch the men of Aran laying out kelp on the rocks, or when you see the chariot ride in “Ben Hur”, the wheels too close to one another, the turns too tight, an accident sure to happen. It is all very exciting even if I don’t want to be a Roman charioteer.
The same principle of building on little things to establish the way of life so that an audience can engage a fictional figure happens even in the greatest of literature, which is proof that this is a universal process of literature rather than something done only in great literature or else a recourse only not-great literature has to avail itself of. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” does this by engaging its audience in political rhetoric. All of the characters act out of moral outrage while at the same time belittling the motives of their antagonists, which is only to do what politicians always do, just as happens when an audience is caught up in a courtroom drama and so exposed to such legalisms as “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “Is there a chance you are mistaken?”, as if it was enough to debunk a fact to say there was a sliver of uncertainty accompanying it. For the moment, in a courtroom drama, the audience buys into such talk, just as in the political arena, whether real or fictional, the audience buys into its characteristic talk and tries to maneuver through that even if one would not want to be caught up in doing that professionally because it would become tedious and unilluminating. And, of course, as citizens, we all get exposed to political rhetoric and decide when too much is too much and therefore turn off the television.
“Julius Caesar” is particularly noteworthy for a rhetorical tour de force which happens when Marc Anthony, in full political mode, delivers his funeral oration and reverses course in the midst of it so that he turns condemnation into praise, which is not just a neat trick but also a plot development in that it allows for the party of Caesar to make war on the party of the conspirators. Shakespeare, in the Marc Anthony funeral oration, sums up the twin themes of honor and duplicity that suffuse the entire play. To paraphrase that funeral oration, Caesar was, admittedly, ambitious, though it turns out that was not so bad because it brought many hostages to Rome, and he certainly did pay for that vice. Brutus, on the other hand, was an honorable man, and no one can doubt that (this delivered with a great deal of sarcasm), and that is why Brutus condemned Caesar and killed him. For his own part, Anthony’s heart is filled with Caesar and he cannot go on to say more, and will leave to his audience whether Brutus was honest or duplicitous. He has already drawn his own conclusion. And so, in the world of Julius Caesar, honor and deceit are all that is needed to explain that world, just as in Judy Garland’s world, talent, which she had, and character flaws, which she also had, are enough to define a Hollywood life.
That speech of Marc Anthony’s is as compelling in its ability to turn the tables as was Winston Churchill when he turned a speech about having to defend Great Britain on the landing beaches and in the cities into a statement of the ultimate victory over Germany, or when FDR used the everyday image of the garden hose to make Lendlease appealing in spite of the American sentiment in favor of neutrality. Great political speeches do make a difference, are the practical events which litter the landscape, as are the platitudes of show business are everywhere found in show biz biopics.
But it is one thing to invoke such a vocabulary and another thing to make it explain the trajectory of the entire plot, the rhetoric of whatever kind illuminating the life of the hero or heroine rather than just moving it on, and that is the failure of “Judy”. The director has let the image of the heroic Garland, the mistreated child star who is overwhelmed by life, replace any attempt to explain her, to make sense of her as anything other than as a legend. The director has fallen for the legend, which is made clear by the fact that he saves “Over the Rainbow” for the last song sung by Garland in her London concerts, because that is the key to her life, she always and ever Dorothy Gale in “The Wizard of Oz”.
“The Wizard of Oz” is a movie that I think is vastly overrated because it is saved from its populist and simple minded message by its color and its music and its set decoration and its truly marvelous performances. But its tone is also set by the smugness of L. Frank Baum, who suggests that a diploma makes the scarecrow smart, when anybody in the audience knows that is a joke because smarts is more than a diploma, just as courage is more than a roar and, most of all, the cliched idea that if you look behind the curtain, you can see that the leader is a fraud. The real truth is that we all have to be able to look at the leader in full panoply and still decide whether he is a fraud or a malevolent figure or not. We look at Churchill and know that he was not a fraud despite all his shenanigans during his long service in Parliament. We don’t have to look behind the curtain to know what Trump is. He is out there in plain sight being what he is and all we need is our eyes to notice that. And so Judy Garland is out there at the end of her life being the trainwreck that she had become, still proclaiming that we are all going to dance down the yellow brick road to see the wizard that really isn’t one. Judy Garland was mawkish to the end, and she was loved for that, because so much of the art of Hollywood is to falsify the truth. One is on far firmer ground if one holds that art speaks the truth rather than is the escape from truth into fantasy and legend.