ON SCREEN: ONE MARRIAGE, TWO FILM REVIEWS
Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch The United States Vs. Billie Holiday
Bury me in Andra Day’s soulful vocals and leave me there to die in melodic euphoria. That is how I want to go. I fell deep down an Andra Day rabbit hole when writing this review and I have no desire to get out of it. I only learned of Day last month, when she won the Golden Globe for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in The United States Vs. Billie Holiday. It’s her first-ever acting role and she has since been nominated for an Academy Award, so there’s no question it’s a remarkable performance. Unfortunately, it’s in an otherwise lacking film.
Greg and I spent the duration of the car ride home picking apart everything that’s wrong with this movie. Most of its problems could’ve been fixed by cutting out at least a third. I can understand why film-maker Lee Daniels left in so many full-length performances of Holiday songs — Day sings them so well and with an incredible likeness to Holiday’s very distinctive jazz vocals — they are perfection, but few add anything narratively to the story.
It isn’t a biopic really: it’s about a specific aspect of Holiday’s life when the United States Government wanted to take her down because her song Strange Fruit was stoking the fires of the civil rights movement. It’s an important, fascinating and film-worthy story but in its quest to include what feels like every real-life run-in Holiday had with “the feds” the film feels repetitive to the detriment of character complexity. I would’ve liked to understand Holiday more. The film portrays her as a drug addict with intimacy issues but rarely seeks to reveal why.
It’s as though Day understood something about Holiday that the film itself doesn’t — or it at least fails to get across to the audience. She undergoes an incredible transformation for this role. In real life, she doesn’t drink, smoke, swear or have sex, but she took up smoking on set, she throws around F-bombs like it’s 2021 and has multiple nude scenes, which she says she found terrifying. It’s an incredible commitment to inhabiting the character. She was very aware that, as a non-actor, this film could have gone terribly and ended her career. She was right to have concerns; the film is at times clunky, monotonous and lacking nuance, but she shines in spite of that, and it will no doubt launch her acting career, which is fine I guess, as long as she never stops singing like a goddamn angel.
Iassume the repetition was kind of the point but after 70 minutes of seeing Billie Holiday being busted by the feds over and over — and over — and over, I was so over it that I knew I couldn’t endure another minute in that cinema. At that point, there was still an hour left. That hour, so interminable, was at least occasionally broken by occasional magnificent musical renditions of Holiday’s songs by Andra Day, which, although enjoyable, didn’t really solve the movie’s central problem. The essence of the story is the battle between Billie Holiday and the man who led the earliest incarnation of the United States’ war on drugs, and who literally hounded her to death — she died in hospital with the police watching over her. It’s a worthy subject and an interesting subject — Holiday’s song Strange Fruit is
The United States Vs. Billie Holiday is
in cinemas now
one of the greatest and most important songs of the 20th century — but the film seems to be interested in the least interesting parts of it. We learn little about Holiday’s life or the reasons for her addiction until late in the film when there’s a brilliant dreamlike sequence, only a few minutes long, recapitulating her terrible childhood, after which we’re taken more or less straight back to the interminable, repetitive bustings by the feds.
A large amount of screen time is dedicated to other characters close to Holiday, but we barely get to know them. Who are they? What is their place in her life? Maybe these are questions that don’t need answering, but in that case, why raise them?
The movie is based on or inspired by journalist Johann Hari’s book Chasing The Scream, which is about the war on drugs, and presumably that explains why the movie is more about the drugs than it is about Holiday, but that begs the question: Why has it been marketed the other way around? After watching the movie’s repetitious storyline play out over and over for two and a quarter hours, I felt like I’d been sold a false bill of goods.
“That was a terrible movie,” I said to Zanna as we left the cinema.
“It wasn’t that bad,” she said.
I rolled my eyes, inwardly, and thought, “Here we go again.”