As Billie Holiday, the brilliant, persecuted, doomed jazz singer, the artist Andra Day—in the new film The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu, February 26)—does it all. She grieves, rages, gets high, makes love, fights, falters, and sings. It’s as thorough and challenging a role as a novice actor could be handed, and Day mostly pulls it off. Her Holiday is fierce and vulnerable—she is victimized by American law enforcement, ravaged by heroin addiction, battered by lovers, and yet maintains a core mettle, shining from within until her last moments on earth. Though the occasional line is flatly delivered, in aggregate Day pulls off a striking act of becoming, playing a legend’s human components while honoring her otherworldly presence.
I wish the movie surrounding Day’s performance were worthy of it. Directed by Lee Daniels and written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a grand survey of roughly a decade of Holiday’s life. Ostensibly, it’s focused on her entanglements with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as led by notorious racist Harry Anslinger. In practice, it yawns this way and that into a scattered psychological portrait.
The film suffers from the most common of biopic ailments: in trying to encompass too much, it becomes a plodding series of episodes held together only by its central performance. This affliction particularly haunts movies about singers, for some reason; perhaps it’s just that much harder to capture and relate the majesty of a vocal artist’s ubiquitous power in a medium so trained in linear story.
Or maybe The United States vs. Billie Holiday just wants to say a lot, and has trouble fitting its ambition into a two-hour runtime. That eagerness to speak is understandable. Holiday’s story lies at a nexus point of so many societal ills: misogyny, racism, homophobia, the criminalization of addiction. Holiday popularized the haunting lament about lynching “Strange Fruit,” a song sometimes credited with galvanizing the civil rights movement of the last century. For that, Holiday drew the ire of a government determined to maintain the status quo. She was both icon and target, cruelly imprisoned and repeatedly harassed for drug crimes in an effort to get her to shut up and stop singing her call to despair and outrage.
This is big, infuriating subject matter, and a writer as sharp and fiery as Parks is a good fit to cover it. But somewhere in the process of this film, she and Daniels get lost. The beginning is heavy on direct exposition, introducing characters motivation-first and plainly laying out the stakes. Which was perhaps necessary for those unfamiliar with Holiday’s history, but the ground laying could have been done with more nuance. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is determined to tell you what it’s about, in nearly every scene. Gradually, it loses even that directive, and veers into listlessness as Holiday’s days grow fewer.
The film’s odd shape is hard on its actors. Trevante Rhodes is perhaps worst served as Jimmy Fletcher, a federal agent sent to infiltrate Holiday’s inner circle to gain evidence of her drug use. There’s a fascinating, sad conflict there, between Jimmy’s pride in being one of the nation’s first Black federal agents and his ugly duty. He’s used as a pawn by his racist bosses and develops a deep bond with Holiday. He’s in a tough spot, which could make for robust drama. But his character never quite blends into the story; he’s often there as mere obstacle or sounding board. Perhaps that’s intentional, the filmmakers not wanting to give too much narrative weight to a man perpetrating such a hideous betrayal. But that leaves Rhodes out in the cold, trying to find traction in a movie that isn’t sure what to do with him.
By the end of the film, we do feel the true tragedy and glory of Holiday’s life. That’s owed almost entirely to Day, whose performance gains a richer timbre as the story elapses. Day is not yet a precise actor—but in her wobbliness and ardor she captures a core spirit, defiant and wounded, that seems to have defined Holiday. Or this film’s version of Holiday, anyway.
The larger political insinuations of The United States vs. Billie Holiday come across clearly enough, and should deepen receptive audiences’ appreciation for Holiday and for “Strange Fruit.” It ought to do the opposite for federal law enforcement, though Anslinger—played stiffly by Garrett Hedlund—and his associates are kept too discrete. We do not get a sense of a system preying on Holiday so much as we see a few bad men, single-minded and obsessive about destroying her. No doubt they were. But they were working in the service of a much larger mechanism, something that this film, for all its reach, does not palpably encapsulate.
Had Daniels honed the film’s focus some—while still allowing Day’s loose vibrance to fill its smoky dressing rooms—maybe it could have rendered a keener sense of its context. Though I can’t really blame Daniels and company for simply wanting to follow Holiday wherever she roams, compelling as Day is in the role. In Day’s magnetism, the film does enough justice to Holiday’s memory that its shagginess is almost forgiven. The rest of the orchestra could use a tune up, but Day, at least, makes for an exciting solo act.
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The Link LonkFebruary 26, 2021 at 10:00PM
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Andra Day Makes Her Case in The United States vs. Billie Holiday - Vanity Fair
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