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.
If you actually read the story, though, your smile may have faded as you learned that the composer Ira Gershwin had sung his old tune “Liza” to the new baby and that, from the way the infant responded to him, “she’s a man’s woman” who “ogles every man she meets.” You may have wondered about those comments as well as the sneery, at times nasty tone infusing the story like a poisonous gas. If somehow you managed to keep going, you would have read a lot about Garland, a little about her husband and less about their daughter. That this child survived Hollywood is remarkable. That she became Liza Minnelli is a damn 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.
What follows is by turns inspiring, jaw-dropping — the songs! the successes! the sequins! — and conspicuously incomplete. Given the winking title this isn’t a surprise. Much like the recent documentary “Faye,” about the life and times of Faye Dunaway, “A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” is a largely enjoyable, cozily intimate movie that plays like it was made by a fan. That shouldn’t necessarily be a problem; love can be a fine place to start when making any movie. Yet because Minnelli has been a public figure her entire life — she was a toddler when she held her mother’s hand in the 1949 film “In the Good Old Summertime” — her story is better known than most and, at times, it was far grimmer than suggested here.
It’s easy to understand why the documentary skims over some of the most difficult periods in Minnelli’s life. After a stage-setting introduction, it opens on her mother’s death, which seems like an attempt to put her in the rearview mirror. The problem is that Garland, unsurprisingly, remained a powerful force in her daughter’s life. Klein addresses that to a degree, examining how Minnelli — with help from the likes of the entertainer and writer Kay Thompson — developed a voice and performance style distinct from her mother’s. Even so, it is hard to grasp how Minnelli even survived childhood. Her heaviest burden, as Gerald Clarke writes in “Get Happy,” a sympathetic biography of Garland, was “being on permanent death watch.”
For Minnelli true believers such quibbles may not matter. The clips are great and so are some of the interviews, notably those with her, Feinstein and Ben Vereen. It is, as it turns out, awfully nice to spend time with Minnelli, to revisit triumphs like Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret” (1972) and her TV special, “Liza With a ‘Z,’” released that same year. Mind you, the lack of attention given to “New York, New York” (1977), Martin Scorsese’s under-loved musical, is eyebrow-raising. It was a vexed production, they had an affair and it flopped, so maybe that’s why it gets short shrift here. But, really, who cares? Anything that encourages you to rewatch “Cabaret” and “New York, New York” — and, reader, I did that just that — deserves some love.
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