The United States vs. Billie Holiday: A magnetic performance in a mess of a biopic
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C-plus
“All those who have attempted to write about her have discovered there are many Billie Holidays,” observed John Szwed in his 2015 book, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth.
His was a fascinating study of how the conflation of the singer’s tormented personal life and unlucky-in-love stage persona, had come to eclipse the magnitude of her musical genius.
And now we come to The United States vs. Billie Holiday, director Lee Daniels’ own over-baked take on an icon of cool.
Like two other recent films, Judas and the Black Messiah and One Night in Miami, this is a film that looks back at the racial politics of a half-century or more ago through a contemporary lens.
Andra Day, more of a replication of Holiday’s sound than the pop-styled adaptation of Diana Ross
Specifically, the film recounts how Holiday, was hounded to her early death, at the age of 44, by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ chief Harry Anslinger,
Unlike those other worthy films, Daniels’ film is an exasperating mess. Echoing that other well-known Holiday biopic, 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues, produced by Motown’s Berry Gordy and starring Diana Ross, it’s a cliched showbiz drama, partially rescued by the magnetism and performance of its star.
In this case, the star is 36-year-old singer-songwriter Day making her film debut. She earned a Grammy nomination for her 2015 debut album, and won a Golden Globe as Best Actress on Sunday for her performance here
As was the case with Ross, Day does her own singing. But unlike, Ross who adapted Holiday’s repertoire to her pop style, Day offers a cover-version simulation of Billie Holiday’s regal bearing and head-tilted delivery, as well as the bitter-sweet tone, distinctive diction and phrasing. Physically, Holiday changed appearance a lot in her adult life, something that Day’s performance barely attempts to recreate, at least until a final hospital scene. Vocally, she adjusts slightly for the years, adding a rasp to the lilt.
The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The director of such raw and sometimes risible films as The Paperboy, Precious and The Butler, Daniels lavishes individual scenes with melodramatic intensity, soaking the period sets in deep rich colours. After the first hour or so, though, Daniels abandons a coherent narrative thread with flashbacks, random black-and-white montages, a drug-dream sequence and scenes of jarringly prurient brutality.
To be fair, Holiday’s biography, full of contradictory and contested stories, would be a challenge to present in any straightforward way. (For an account of what’s true in the film, see Slate’s fact check).
Inspired by the sensationalist first chapter of journalist Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, the film posits that Anslinger, the racist federal drug czar, was obsessed with stopping Holiday from performing Strange Fruit. A protest art song with its gruesome lyrics (“Pastoral scene of the gallant south/The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth”), the song grew into a secular hymn, and the subject of an entire book by David Margolick.
The song was written by a Jewish-American teacher and songwriter, Abel Meeropol, a communist who taught James Baldwin, and became stepfather to the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg when they were executed for espionage. But Strange Fruit’s rich cultural background is unexplored within the film. Holiday’s persistence in singing it, as she says in an early scene, set during the interview, is because it’s about Civil Rights.
The whiplash tonal-shifts in the film are bizarre even to describe. It opens with a notorious photograph (The Burning of Will Brown’s Body, 1919, Omaha, Nebraska) that shows a crowd of white people gazing at the charred corpse of a black man. Then after a brief cut of Billie standing defiantly on the stage, wearing a gown with her white gardenia, it jumps to an imaginary interview in the late ‘50s.
The interviewer is a prissy 1950s radio personality wearing a Liberace-sized pile of hair, who goes by the name of Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan, apparently channelling Martin Short’s Jimmy Glick)
You can tell Billie’s already near the end because she coughs on her cigarette. Reginald expresses his deep devotion to her work and then asks — no kidding —“Tell me, what’s it like to be a coloured woman?”
Like many of the characters here, Reginald appears, and disappears, and appears again, apparently at random. His voice-over carries us to a flashback, a performance a decade earlier at the integrated club Café Society. And our perspective changes to that of a G.I.,Jimmy Fletcher (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), who has come to check out the singer.
There are other threads that come and go. Natasha Lyonne appears, and then disappears again, as Tallulah Bankhead, one of Holiday’s real-life lovers. Orson Welles, another of Holiday’s lovers, is name-checked but not impersonated onscreen.
There are scenes of Holiday sprawling in a drug haze, and a string of abusive treacherous men, and Billie onstage in great gowns. But the most persistent seam of the narrative follows Holiday’s relationship and (entirely speculative) romance with Fletcher. That’s awkward because, it turns out, Fletcher is a federal agent, recruited by the hateful Anslinger (a one-dimensional Garrett Hedlund) to make an example of the singer.
Jimmy first infiltrates Billie’s circle pretending to be a shy writer and fan, and she flirts with him. Later, he pops up as the head of an arrest squad, putting her in prison for a year for heroin possession.
After Billie gets out, and is denied a cabaret license allowing her to work, he is assigned to her case again, following her tour bus. This time, he falls in love with her, revealing his washboard abs, and proving his tender loving is much better than the brutal thumping she gets backstage from her former lover. They go on tour, play baseball, feed each other food and ride in a rowboat, like a couple in an insurance ad.
Fletcher’s a passive character, and there are but a few scenes about his moral dilemma — sleeping with the woman he’s spying on for the feds.
In the film’s most demented scene, Jimmy shoots up heroin with her, to the roar of Charlie Wilson’s The Devil and I Got Up to Dance a Slow Dance. As he nods out, he meets a 14-year-old Billie (Taryn Brown), who leads him to be a witness to the moment when she was forced into prostitution by her mother. A few minutes later, the couple are in an open field where they witness a Black man’s body hanging from a tree, and Billie runs away and somehow arrives on a venue and sings Strange Fruit in its entirety..
There are invented moments in The United States Vs. Billie Holiday that are actually charming. These include the backstage sequences with Holiday’s girl support, Roslyn (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), and the cross-dressing stylist Miss Freddy (Miss Lawrence), where Daniels’ shows Holiday’s well-documented witty and bawdy side - the scrapper and not the figurehead or the victim.
The film could have used more of that from her - or at least some indication that Holiday was an artist who made complex and discerning choices, and was not just a vessel for amplifying personal and collective traumas.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Andra Day.
The United States vs Billie Holiday. Directed by Lee Daniels. Written by Suzan-Lori Parks. Starring: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Leslie Jordan, Miss Lawrence, Natasha Lyonne, Da’Vine Joy Randolph. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is available on VOD from March 2.