'Zellweger’s is the most persuasive and arresting big-ticket lead performance I’ve seen so far this season,' writes V.F. critic rilaws
She’s more soulful too. Zellweger, rubber-banding her voice and cocking her head at considered angles, pours a great compassion into playing Garland at her worst, keenly locating and expressing the very human pain underlying all the diva antics. The hardest thrashing is internal, as Zellweger’s sorrowful but warm performance carefully illustrates. The storm of her public persona is far smaller in size than the private and terrible riot inside her.
Some might find the whole thing too fussy an actor exercise. That’s inevitable for any performance like this, though perhaps more inevitable when it’s a woman doing it. Which isn’t to suggest that all criticisms of Zellweger’s performance are inherently sexist. It’s just that more male actors get praise for this type of work than do their female counterparts.
The other obvious sticking point to Zellweger’s performance, and it’s a related one, is the singing, which Zellweger does on her own, unlike a recent Oscar-winning embodiment of a famous, late musician. Again Zellweger captures the essence of something: Garland’s vocal power, both trembling and forceful, haunted and sweetly sincere. That to me is more important a feat than hitting the notes in an exactly accurate way.
Zellweger’s is the most persuasive and arresting big-ticket lead performance I’ve seen so far this season, the kind of turn that needn’t be bolstered by an exterior narrative. Though of course that narrative will help, as Zellweger reemerges to remind us of her starry gifts. If I were in the Academy, I’d vote for her, though hopefully with more of a focus on the wonder of her performance instead of what a Zellweger win would say about the redemptive contours of a career in show business.
Will she win? At this point it seems the likeliest of all possible Oscar outcomes. But she’s got competition in forms both known and unknown. I’d love to see some real momentum emerge forwhich won the top jury prize at Sundance this year. Woodard’s is a deliberately restrained performance where Zellweger’s is a deluge. Still, Woodard bracingly illuminates the film’s mounting grief, its creeping horror. Woodard of course has her own Oscar narrative.
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