There are two things true about Rupert Goold’s new Judy Garland film, Judy. One is that, yes, it’s an exciting semi-comeback vehicle for the actor Renée Zellweger, returning from some self-imposed isolation to do the kind of big, splashy, “look at me go” work that people—and by “people,” I, of course, mean the Academy—love. That’s a fun narrative to follow, giving the ever-taxing awards season journey a more easily navigable shape. We know that arc, we’ve seen it before. It either leads to sweet—if sometimes anticlimactic—triumph or a bitter, resigned kind of defeat. It’s a whole human story, neatly told.
But the neatness of that story does, in its way, distract from what’s also true about Judy: that Zellweger is really, really—like actually—good in the movie. Separate of all the…
