ALL THAT JAZZ
THE “VERSUS” suggests there’s a battle at stake — and there is. Billie Holiday (a charismatic Andra Day) is filling concert halls and pissing off government officials with her song “Strange Fruit.” It’s a cri de coeur that openly mourns both the injustice of lynchings and the American political system’s utter disinterest in doing anything about them. So, she’s got to go. And the woman’s own follies, addictions, and weaknesses become the key to silencing her. Cue Jimmy Fletcher ( Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), a black FBI agent — one of the agency’s earliest — whose job is to be the feds’ eyes and ears in Harlem and, eventually, to keep an eye on Lady Day.
The film’s got a stacked deck of a supporting cast, including Natasha Lyonne (as Tallulah Bankhead), Rob Morgan, and the great Da’Vine Joy. The script is credited to the equally dynamic, prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, whose portrayals of the black women undone and done wrong by history and representation are vexed, discomfiting, confrontational.
If you’re looking for a film with any historical curiosity about Holiday, however, well, keep looking. Director Lee Daniels’ look at the lady singing the blues is many things, but a requisite portrait of this period in the singer’s life, or the urgent circumstances of this song, it is not. Instead, we get a reductive, mismanaged affair full of dangerous tropes, bad writing, questionable thematic emphases and — coming from a director who is usually dependably brash — a dutiful, pervasive dullness. We get heroin trips, abusive men, all pain, no gain, no reprieve, and insight least of all. We get the kind of depiction that sells her short — sells history short. What we don’t get is a study of a troubled woman whose political commitment to her song is hounded by the state; we simply get a portrait of the troubles themselves. For so many reasons, in so many ways, it didn’t need to be this way.