Anyone who’s ever seen perform knows that while the love she draws from the audience is her oxygen, the love she pours right back is just as essential to who she is. That symbiosis is the power source illuminating Bruce David Klein’s lovingly assembled docu-portrait, , an apt title for a salute to a woman who never met a sentence she couldn’t punctuate with superlatives. The raucous cackle Minnelli lets loose at frequent intervals while reflecting on her life attests that her struggles and sorrows and physical frailty have not defeated her.
The film opens with a dizzying montage of magazine covers and clips accompanied by a stream of gushy praise from prominent fans. Klein seldom shrinks away from adoration, but nor does he gloss over the challenges for the star of being born into a spotlight, living up to a lifetime of comparisons to her mother, , and carving out her own space while every short-lived romance, failed marriage and downslide into alcoholism and substance abuse became tabloid fodder. It’s not hagiography when the subject’s generosity of spirit infuses the entire doc.
That generosity applies especially to the fulsome acknowledgement she shows for the five mentors without whom she might never have succeeded in inventing a persona so luminous it requires only a first name. With a Z. Leading that quintet is Kay Thompson, the vocal coach, nightclub performer and godmother who swooped in at Garland’s funeral to take the shattered 23-year-old Minnelli under.
