What a difference a Day makes to biopic
The United States vs. Billie Holiday (R16, 131 mins)
Directed by Lee Daniels Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
Idon’t know of anyone who has been as badly treated by feature film-makers, or better treated by documentarymakers, as Billie Holiday.
Holiday is a vivid lightning rod in the parallel worlds of America’s wars on women and on its Black citizenry.
She – Eleanora Fagan – was born into crushing poverty and raised by people for whom the word callous would be a compliment.
She was prostituted, abused, beaten and raped as a child and then rose to become one of the most famous women on the planet, with a voice and conviction of such indelible power the US Government was actually afraid of her.
Holiday lived with addictions to heroin, alcohol and lousy men. At her artistic height, she was as big a star as Ella Fitzgerald.
But in her decision to perform and record her incandescent interpretation of Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching poem Strange Fruit, she attracted the attention of (J Edgar) Hoover’s blatantly racist FBI, who were at the time doing everything they could to crush and undermine the civil rights movement, to which Strange Fruit had become a rallying cry.
And yet, with all this nearbottomless mother lode of potential source material and directions in which he could have taken his biopic, The United States vs. Billie Holiday director Lee Daniels (Precious) chooses instead to hang his hat on an almost certainly fictitious romance between Holiday and FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher.
Daniels’ film is an uneven, unsatisfying and poorly assembled lump of a thing. And yet, some of its constituent parts are breathtakingly good.
As Holiday, singer Andra Day is surely my personal pick to take home that Academy Award next week.
Whenever Day is on screen, Billie Holiday comes to life. Day – who took her name from Holiday’s own Lady Day – is breathtakingly good, steering every scene, nailing the key moments and – astonishingly – performing her own vocals. For Day’s performance alone, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is worth every dollar of your ticket, and more.
But, the connective tissue that should hold these scenes together is flimsy and misplaced. The script takes such an odd route into Holiday’s life and career, favouring fabrication over incredible fact, the film becomes impossible to recommend other than for that central performance, the supporting ensemble and some very acceptable cinematography.
If you rummage around online, or at Aro Video in Wellington and Alice’s in Christchurch, there are plenty of decent documentaries on Holiday’s unrepeatable life.
But, in fiction, as in life, Holiday mostly deserves far better than she gets in