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The fizzy, determinedly upbeat documentary charts how Liza Minnelli survived Hollywood. It’s inspiring, jaw-dropping and conspicuously incomplete.
By Manohla Dargis
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In September 1946, the fan magazine Modern Screen ran a multi-page story on one of the film industry’s latest attractions. The ostensible subject was a new baby girl, Liza, born to the star Judy Garland and the director Vincente Minnelli. Titled “Hay-lo, Liza, Hay-lo!,” it included a large, glamorous color shot of Garland opposite two much smaller black-and-white photographs, including one of her holding Liza. If you were flipping through the magazine back in the day, you may have paused and smiled at these images of Hollywood royalty.
However, if you are really reading the story, your smile would possibly have disappeared when he learned that the lyricist Ira Gershwin had sung his old song “Liza” to the new baby and that, because of the way the child replied: “He is a guy that Woguy “Who is biting each boy and with every boy he knows? Possibly he would have wondered about those comments and for the mocking, an unpleasant tone that infuses the story as poisonous gas. If you controlled to move on, you would have read a lot about Garland, a little about her husband and less about her daughter. The fact that this child survived Hollywood is remarkable. Which has become Liza Minnelli is a great miracle.
The fizzy, determinedly upbeat documentary “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” charts how Minnelli did just that (or that’s the idea, at any rate). A creation story in a minor key, it traces how the only child of two film immortals beat the odds, survived terrible loss, weathered unfortunate relationships and became an international star in her own right. Hers is a talent that owes something to genetics and serious connections, of course — by the time Minnelli was 18, she was performing with Garland at the London Palladium — as well as a lot of sweat, perseverance, mentors, friends and what seem like indomitable survival skills.
To tell her story, the director Bruce David Klein has assembled a trove of archival material — culled from films, television, newsreels and the like — that he has woven together with a number of original interviews and divided into chapters. These largely focus on her relationships with various men and women, friends and lovers, who helped Minnelli find her way after Garland’s death in 1969 at 47, a still-shocking age. Liza was 23 when her mother died and her death may have brought some relief because of Garland’s deeply troubled past and health issues, as Minnelli’s longtime friend Mia Farrow couches it on camera. “So, what’s next?” the singer Michael Feinstein then asks, before helping to answer that question.
The following is in turn inspiring, impressive, the songs! Success! Glow! – And in an incomplete dazzling way. Given the intermittent title, this is not a surprise. Like the recent documentary “Faye”, about the life and time of Faye Dunaway, “a surely true horrible story” is a lovely and comfortable film that reproduces as it was done through a fan. This deserves not necessarily a problem; Love can be an intelligent starting point when making a movie. However, because Minnelli was a public figure of his whole life, it was a girl when he held her mother’s hand in the 1949 movie “in The Smart Old Summer”, his story is greater that is the maximum of them and Sometimes it is much darker than it was advised here.
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