Holiday biopic features right star, wrong script
For about 20 minutes, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” gets by on the sheer excitement of having Billie Holiday recreated on screen. Grammynominated singer and now Golden Globenominated actress Andra Day doesn’t look like Holiday, but her voice is close to the real thing as you can imagine. This isn’t Renee Zellweger struggling to hit the notes in “Judy.” Andra Day is as much like Lady Day as one could ever hope.
But when the excitement wears off, we begin to notice what’s missing. Humor, for example. Holiday’s friends said she was funny, but here she’s almost entirely miserable. Another missing element is harder to define, but has something to do with this: The Holiday we get in this film lacks the spark of an artist. Watching “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” you’d never guess this was the story of an interpretive genius, but rather that of an unfortunate drug addict who just happened to be able to sing.
Holiday’s artistry gets short shrift throughout. Based on a book by Johann Hari and adapted by playwright SuzanLori Parks, this Lee Daniels film instead postulates that Holiday was an early civil rights hero, whose decision to keep singing “Strange Fruit” — a powerful protest song about lynching — led to her being targeted and destroyed by the J. Edgar Hooverrun FBI. And there is just enough truth in this to justify telling Holiday’s story in this way.
“Strange Fruit” did put Holiday in Hoover’s crosshairs, and the FBI hounded her to her deathbed. It was a national disgrace that the movie does well to point out. But it’s also true that Holiday’s bent for selfdestruction hardly needed governmental assistance, and that her main contribution was as a peerless artist, not as an activist.
Basically, when we’re talking about Billie Holiday, we are talking about a woman, decades ahead of her time, who did whatever she wanted — with melody, with drugs and alcohol, and with lovers male and female. She had a sad ending, and the ending came too soon, for sure, but still it was a life of profound accomplishment. To turn her into a helpless victim, I would argue, is to misinterpret her life.
But even if you dispute that, you’d have to agree that presenting her as a tragic case turns the movie into something dramatically stagnant. When she’s not singing, Holiday just sits around stoned in the film, waiting for the FBI to do something bad to her. In this context, even her great act of defiance — continuing to sing “Strange Fruit” — seems less assertive than selfdestructive.
To make matters worse, the movie turns Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), a Black law enforcement agent who worked undercover and arrested her, into the goodguy lover that Holiday should have stuck with.
Lacking a protagonist with drive or purpose, Daniels and Parks try to hold the audience with gauzy flashbacks, but all they show is Holiday getting abused in the past. We also get scenes of the feds scheming to destroy her, but these scenes are so caricatured as to be absurd.
So “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is a misfire, and what a shame, because Andra Day had it in her to be great in this. The movie just didn’t let her bring it out.