The Living Image

When it comes to Rupert Goold’s Judy I find myself in grave danger of repeating things I’ve already said at least once this year. Within the wonderful world of cinema there is, of course, space for many weird and niche subgenres – I recall relatives boggling, many years ago, when I sat down one evening to watch a documentary focusing on Mexican luchador wrestling horror movies – but I never really thought of the ‘biopic focusing on the declining years of a Hollywood star, preferably set in the UK’ to be one of them. But it seems I could be mistaken: a couple of years ago we had Films Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, then earlier on this year there was Stan and Ollie, and now we have Goold’s Judy Garland movie.

The resemblance between Stan and Ollie and Judy is particularly pronounced – to the point where they both feature the impresario Bernard Delfont as a character – and one wonders why nobody on either production noticed this, especially when you consider that both have been made by the film wing of the BBC (hence all those UK settings). Oh well – I suppose that sometimes there’s just a natural, obvious way of telling a story, and you may as well stick to it. The potential downside to this is that you end up making exactly the film everyone is anticipating, which can be a problem.

The movie flashes back and forth between Judy Garland’s early career in the late 1930s and early 40s, where she is portrayed by Darci Shaw, and the late 1960s, by which point she has turned into Renee Zellweger. (It will probably come as no surprise if I say there is rather more Zellweger than Shaw in the film.) By this point Garland’s life has become dismayingly chaotic – she is hugely in debt, unable to get work, rootless, addicted to all kinds of substances, reduced to dragging her children on stage with her in small-time shows. One of her ex-husbands (Rufus Sewell) begins proceedings to take custody of them. The only bright spot seems to be her new friendship with Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), a young entrepreneur.

Desperately needing money, Garland agrees to a stint appearing at the Talk of the Town in London, as this will provide funds for the custody battle if nothing else. But the ghosts of her past are hard to shake off, and her assistant/minder (Jessie Buckley) finds that she really has to earn her money getting Garland on stage, on time, in a fit state to perform every night. Is this residency in London the start of a new beginning for her, or just another stage in her decline and fall?

Well I think we all know the answer to that one, as part of Judy Garland’s still-potent allure is the heady mixture of Hollywood glamour and pervasive tragedy surrounding her: no matter what her talent as a singer – and the film does not equivocate in its presentation of her as one of the greatest performers of the 20th century – if she had turned her life around and retired into obscurity, she would not be the legend she remains today. But the film suggests this was never really an option, that the manipulation of her life by Hollywood studio bosses from a very young age, and the pressures of stardom, hollowed out Garland as a person – such was the focus on her image as a star that the real Frances Gumm disappeared somewhere along the way, and Garland was left only having any real sense of who she was while performing to an audience.

It’s a tragic story but it does rather lend itself to the style of performance that Renee Zellweger opts to give: she is playing Garland the icon, all sass and vulnerability, the brittle diva. It’s an impressive physical transformation, to say nothing of Zellweger’s recreation of Garland’s vocal style. All together, it’s very much one of those full-on I-want-an-Oscar-and-I-want-it-now turns, and I wouldn’t bet against Zellweger snagging a nomination at least. But I’m not sure she does any more than hit the marks you’d expect in a Garland impersonation; I don’t think she necessarily finds anything unexpected in the role.

Nevertheless, she does dominate the movie (as you would expect). This is almost a shame as the film does feature some very capable performers who are perhaps a bit underserved as a result – most obviously Jessie Buckley, a tremendously capable singer and actress herself, doesn’t get a huge amount to do as Garland’s handler. The brevity of Michael Gambon’s contribution as Delfont is also somewhat disappointing. A pleasant surprise is a brief but affecting appearance by the magician Andy Nyman (creator of the brilliant Ghost Stories) as a dedicated Garland fan, acknowledging her enduring popularity with a particular fanbase. I feel obliged to mention the faint oddity of John Dagliesh showing up as Britain’s King of Skiffle Lonnie Donegan, but manage your expectations: we don’t get to see Renee Zellweger giving us Judy Garland’s cover version of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (the film would have been a bit more interesting if it had).

On the whole the film sticks pretty closely to the template for this kind of thing, with the hugely talented icon given humanity by the insight into their human failings and frailties. The film plays this rather smartly – it doesn’t shy away from depicting Garland as being demanding, needy and often nearly impossible to work with, but at the same time ensures she retains audience sympathy by the inclusion of the flashbacks depicting her treatment by Louis B Meyer and others: treated as a commodity from a very young age, not allowed to eat or sleep properly, manipulated by the studios to the point where it virtually constitutes abuse. Cynical and desensitised though I obviously am, I still found these scenes to be affecting and I was surprised to find myself quite angry on Garland’s behalf; likewise, the climax of the film proved to be unexpectedly moving.

It’s not quite enough to lift the film to a higher level – it doesn’t provide the same insights as Stan and Ollie did, for example. It gives you the Judy Garland you’ve heard about and are expecting to see, but not much more than that. It is well-mounted, decently-scripted and the performances are generally well-pitched. It’s by no means a bad film, but whatever power and emotion it acquires are derived entirely from its subject.

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The Maternal Triangle

Here’s the thing about me and the Bridget Jones movies: it’s never quite as simple as the usual ‘want to see a movie > see the movie’ progression. One day in 2001, my sister, her husband, and I wanted to go and see a movie to cheer ourselves up (we had just been to the funeral of a much-loved relative). I proposed Bridget Jones’s Diary, she said okay, he vetoed it on the grounds that it was ‘a chick flick’. So we ended up going to see Spy Kids instead, most of which my sister ended up sleeping through.

Then three years later the sequel came along, which I confess I was not much interested by, until word came along that this film – for some reason which is utterly beyond me – would be preceded by the first showing of the first trailer for Revenge of the Sith. Friends who know me only in my jaded current incarnation may have a hard time believing it, but this was a Big Deal at the time, and in my usual deftly Machiavellian way I talked my family into going to see it (the Bridget Jones sequel, obviously; I kept quiet about the last Star Wars film being in any way involved).

And that seemed very much to be it, although there is of course no statute of limitations on doing sequels (increasingly it feels like there really should be, though, don’t you think?). Now here comes Bridget Jones’s Baby, which I got talked into going to see (it was not a particularly hard sell as I’ll watch almost anything), and…

Well, look. Fifteen years is a long time in movies; the life expectancy of a career can be very much less than that (just ask Chris O’Donnell or Alicia Silverstone). In 2001 Renee Zellweger was an up-and-comer and Miramax Pictures were a force to be reckoned with – these days, I imagine most people would struggle to name a recent vehicle for the actress and since the Weinsteins sold the company, Miramax have been making rather fewer waves of late. In short, this film feels a bit like it’s been made simply because it’s likely to be a commercial success for a bunch of people whose careers really need one right now.

The film is directed by Sharon Maguire. The laws of sequeldom demand that nothing has substantially changed for the principals in the 14 years since the last movie, so Bridget Jones (Zellweger) is still working in TV news, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is still a high-powered barrister, and so on (the plot also requires them to have split up, although of course they still have deep feelings for one another). What, you may be wondering, of Hugh Grant’s character? Well, as Grant has opted not to come back (A Wise Career Move? Discuss), his character is missing, presumed dead – clearly they are still hoping he may be talked into appearing in Bridget Jones’s Menopause or Bridget Jones’s Hip Replacement or whatever the next sequel is called.

Anyway, having just turned 43 (all I will say on this subject is that Renee Zellweger herself is somewhat older) and feeling somewhat forlorn, Bridget allows herself to be talked into going to the Glastonbury Festival (cue mud-splattered slapstick pratfalls) where she ends up having an only moderately contrived one-nighter with passing billionaire Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey). Then, a few days later, she bumps into Darcy again at a christening, and when I say ‘bumps into’, I mean it in the Biblical sense.

Well, as the film is entitled Bridget Jones’s Baby, I’m sure you don’t need me to draw you a diagram as to what happens next. Cue lots of farcical misunderstandings and chaos as Bridget attempts to determine who the father is, while trying to keep the two men from finding out about each other. Zellweger’s main achievement is still her English accent. Emma Thompson appears as Bridget’s obstetrician, and gets most of the best lines, but then this should not come as a major surprise seeing as she co-wrote the script.

And in the end I suppose it all passes the time agreeably enough, though it did feel to me to be a bit too long. There are some very funny set pieces, mostly of the low-comedy variety, although they strike an unexpected vein of comedy gold quite early on when Zellweger starts lip-synching to House of Pain. This is, essentially, very much a standard British mainstream rom-com in the modern idiom, which translates as aspirational lifestyles, just a bit too much graphic sexual talk for you to feel comfortable watching it with your parents, upbeat pop-songs, and a slightly bemusing certainty that people shouting the F-word a lot is still inherently funny. (I mean, it was when Hugh Grant did it in 1994, but nowadays?)

The problem I had with the film is that its central idea just isn’t that funny or easy to identify with – the first two were essentially about whether your life partner should be the exciting, fun, unreliable one, or the dull but solid one (Colin Firth’s main achievement in these films is to make ‘dull but solid’ seem so attractive). Many people have had that kind of dilemma, I would imagine, but the situation of unexpectedly becoming a geriatric single mother while being uncertain who the father is is probably less universal.

Does Grant’s absence hurt the film? I would have to say so, partly because parachuting in a new main character three films in is never very successful, but also because Hugh Grant is simply an extremely accomplished light comedy actor of exactly the kind this sort of film needs. Dempsey isn’t actually bad, but he’s just a bit dull. As a result, Colin Firth really has to take on the job of lifting the film, and to be fair he does a better than decent job of it – but, and this may just be a personal thing, he seemed to me to be surrounded by a strangely mournful aura, as though every fibre of his being had grown accustomed to being a serious leading actor and no longer wanted to just be the male lead in a British rom-com.

The central thrust of the story is therefore just not that funny and the film resorts to a sort of lowest-common-denominator sentimentalism instead; all the bits which really made me laugh were rather peripheral. As I said, a lot of this is very broad comedy, and the rest is an extremely mixed bag – there are some desperate-feeling jokes where people who are middle-aged and feeling it make fun of young people and their beards, a peculiar not-very-topical subplot about Darcy representing a band clearly meant to be Pussy Riot (then again, this film has apparently been in development for six or seven years), and even a gag about Margaret Thatcher which would have been cutting-edge in 1989 (I’m sure it hasn’t been in development for that long).

For me it all felt rather contrived and perhaps a little bit desperate; I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t laugh, but I did sometimes feel like I was perhaps doing the film a favour by doing so. But your mileage may vary; most of the audience at the screening I went to were rolling in the aisles pretty consistently all the way through, and the person whose idea it was that we saw it said she couldn’t remember the last time she had such a good time at the cinema (what, better than West Side Story?, I rather grumpily wanted to say). I still can’t help thinking that this is undemanding stuff which knows its audience and will probably do quite well as a result. But God knows what the next one will be like.

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Tap Gere

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published February 6th 2003:

A few years ago I took me dear old dad to the pictures for his birthday present. We went to see Gladiator, watched it, enjoyed it, but in the end decided it was a good and efficient film rather than a really great one. The staggering success of the film both at the box office and with the critics was thus a bit of a surprise to us both. In the end I put it down to the fact that this was a film from a genre Hollywood hadn’t touched for nearly forty years, but a genre people still had a great fondness and nostalgia for – and it was a combination of novelty and nostalgia that made it such a hit.

Well, another year, another family celebration and off we went to see Rob Marshall’s Chicago – which also looks destined to do very well come Oscar night, and also rake in a tidy sum. I had my suspicions that this film was riding on a wave of affection for an older style of film-making in just the same way Gladiator did – but then again I’m really not a great fan of musicals.

Chicago is set in 1920s Chicago (do you see what they’ve done there? Clever, isn’t it?). Wannabe star Roxie Hart (the eternally hamster-cheeked Renee Zellweger) is outraged to learn that the man she’s using to sleep her way to the top is in fact only interested in her bottom and has no intention of helping her succeed. So she murders him. She ends up on the same prison wing as bona fide star Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones), who’s in the slammer for murdering her sister and her husband. In order to secure her release Roxie retains the services of brilliant but unscrupulous lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), who impresses upon her the importance of keeping the media on her side…

So, an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza set in a women’s prison. The omens were not good. But put all thoughts of Prisoner Cell Block H: The Musical from your mind as Chicago is actually a fantastic night out. Obviously a film like this lives or dies on the strength of the musical numbers and one of the most interesting things about Chicago is its approach to this: rather than employing the standard, faintly ridiculous technique of having characters simply burst into song as they go about their daily lives, the film presents Roxie as a delusional fantasist who sees everything in terms of a musical number of some kind – so most of the songs happen in her head. It’s an interesting conceit and to begin with I thought it was a rather craven one, the film-makers wanting to have all the pizazz and spectacle of a proper musical but without risking employing all the much-derided conventions of one. But it works, and what’s more it allows the routines and choreography from the stage show to be employed pretty much unchanged in many places.

Now I don’t know about you but I didn’t have Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta Jones and Richard Gere pegged as singing and dancing types, but they all acquit themselves pretty well. And when he’s not razzle-dazzling Gere delivers a fantastic performance as the shyster who fights his cases more in the gossip columns than the courthouse. The supporting cast is excellent – Queen Latifah as the formidable warden delivers a showstopper, Lucy Liu has a tiny, non-singing cameo, and John C Reilly – currently making a bid for the title of hardest-working-man-in-cinema – does his good-hearted schmo turn again (but reveals he can sing a bit too).

I find it sickly amusing that the British ‘quality tabloids’ (yup, that’s an oxymoron) are unstinting in their criticism of certain films on moral grounds but have praised Chicago to the skies – odd, seeing that the happy ending consists of enormous success for a couple of amoral, unrepentant murderers. I suppose it’s another demonstration of the power of cheap music. Slight ethical queasiness aside, I did enjoy this film far more than I expected to, and much to my surprise it’s a film with things to say for itself. Its cynical commentary on media manipulation and the nature of celebrity are very much relevent to 2003. A terrific piece of smart, sharp, glitzy entertainment. My kinda town? Chicago is.

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