The United States vs Billie Holiday fails to do her story justice
This epic melodrama charts the US state’s persecution of jazz queen Billie Holiday, but fails to do her story justice,
The torch singer with the hard life is a cliché with good reason, and none harder than Billie Holiday’s. The 1940s jazz stylist with that uniquely raspy, hypnotising voice had it tough from the get-go, and once fame hit was bullied, used and beaten by a string of dreadful men. Her addictions to alcohol and heroin were well known, and she was just 44 years old when she died of cirrhosis, her voice and body destroyed by decades of misuse. But that’s not the whole story of a great talent’s tragic demise, and in Lee Daniels’ woozy drama we hear how she might have been driven to it.
Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia in 1915, she was abandoned by her father, neglected by her mother, spent much of her early childhood in care and was the victim of an attempted rape at the age of 10. Most of this we only glimpse in flashback here, because The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses on the last decade of the singer’s life, when her stellar career hits the skids with some help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
As we’ve noted before, that organisation’s charming founder J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with the possibility of a black uprising, and intent on quashing anything that might upset the apartheid apple cart that then persisted in the south. In 1939, Ms. Holiday had released a song called Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meerpool, which made explicit reference to the southern practice of lynching. Bad form in 1940s America, and though Billie was warned time and again to stop singing it, she bravely continued.
The authorities were not amused, in particular one Harry J. Anslinger, the zealous commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Not keen on jazz, or perhaps on black people in general, Anslinger was incensed by Holiday’s emotionally charged renditions of Strange Fruit, and decided she should be stopped at all cost. As Lee Daniels’ film makes clear, Billie’s heroin addiction would make it all too easy for him.
Andra Day plays the troubled singer, who in 1947 is at the top of her game and packing
out glitzy venues like Carnegie Hall when Anslinger (played with thin-lipped menace by Garret Hedlund) has a bright idea.
The wily commissioner had already begun to infiltrate the east coast jazz scene with African-American agents, and now orders a handsome specimen called Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) to schmooze his way into Billie’s inner circle and gather information to arrest her.
According to Suzan-Lori Parks’ screenplay, Fletcher will repent his role in Billie’s arrest and imprisonment, and begin a tender romance with the singer, but there seems little evidence to back this wishful story up. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, the Fletcher-Holiday romance is presented as fact, one of several structural problems in a drama that has its moments but sometimes seems like your average TV-movie-of-the-week.
Nothing wishy-washy about Andra Day’s performance, however: she captures both the inner strength and underlying vulnerability of her character, and does a wonderful job of impersonating Ms. Holiday’s cracked, raw and utterly distinctive singing voice.
We’re given insights into her chaotic lifestyle, and entourage: Tyler James Williams plays Lester Young, the great saxophonist and Billie’s loyal accompanist, and Natasha Lyonne is Tallulah Bankhead, the film actress with whom Holiday had a close and possibly romantic relationship.
Billie flew high in her youth, was feted in Hollywood, romantically involved with the likes of Charles Laughton and Orson Welles. But in this film she’s sometimes portrayed as a helpless victim, caught between abusive lovers and a government that wants her silenced, or even dead.
‘Lee Daniels’ film has its flaws, but does come alive whenever Andra Day takes the stage to sing’
The efficiency with which the FBI went about its business was chilling: Billie was sent to prison for a year for heroin use, barred from performing in many states, harried towards an early grave. Narcotics agents even decided to arrest her as she lay dying, and she expired with her ankle handcuffed to a hospital bed.
All because of a song she either could not or would not stop singing. The United States vs. Billie Holiday fails to do her story justice, but does come alive when Andra Day takes the stage to sing.
Her rendition of Strange Fruit is as moving and eerie as you might expect, but a performance of Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do is even better. Holiday sings it with defiance, but its lyrics are chilling. ‘I’d rather my man would hit me, than jump right up and quit me’, she croons at one point, smiling dead-eyed at the camera. Men showed Billie little kindness in her short, brutal life.