We’ve seen twin patterns in Oscar races before. Plenty of times in fact. 1999 saw two prestige Elizabethan movies competing against each other in most major categories. 2008 saw a similar battle between two large scale revisionist westerns. There are a few such trends in this years’ nominations, one of the most interesting being two within the Best Actress category for playing major influential figures in the history of black popular music. I’ve already reviewed Viola Davis’ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but I had to only just now seek out The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the performance that got debut actress Andra Day such acclaimed recognition.
Andra Day is not a complete unknown (though I had no familiarity with her work) -she’s been a successful recording artist for some time and has even been nominated for a Grammy and an Emmy. It was perhaps only a matter of time before she got an opportunity like this, to headline a new film about the life of Billie Holiday with particular emphasis on how her drug use was vilified and exacerbated by the governments’ early War on Drugs campaign in retaliation for the release of her vehemently anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit”. Directed by Lee Daniels, the film puts her through some pretty extreme emotional turmoil, living up to the title (which comes from a real court case resulting in a brief stint in prison) that encapsulates just how much Billie Holiday’s country seemed out to get her.
Holiday is very conscious of both the disproportionate targeting of her and the larger fact of the manufactured nature of the War on Drugs as a way of corrupting and suppressing black communities. And she’s seen to be very frank about it, not least in the interview that forms the movies’ framing device. The movie plays well both her awareness of this structure and her inability to keep from falling victim to it. It touches on her psychology, warped and informed by a tragic upbringing. And Andra Day is fully capable of living up to all of this. She’s not the first to play the iconic singer, and not even the first to earn an Oscar nomination in doing so –Diana Ross beat her to the punch nearly fifty years ago in Lady Sings the Blues. But Day thoroughly makes the part her own. Her Billie Holiday is both an extremely strong and formidable force of nature, and a beaten-down self-destructive woman in need of real help. Perhaps her best scene is one that establishes the origin of “Strange Fruit”: while travelling between venues she comes upon two bodies hanging lynched from a tree in evocation of that famous photo of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith that is said to have inspired the song. In this moment the film adds a great personal connection (Holiday didn’t actually write the song herself) by implying she has a deep relationship to the culture of lynching, and we witness her express in unconstrained sorrow how traumatizing it is for her, while also subtly understanding why it’s so important she sing about it.
And of course we can’t talk about the movies’ presentation of Holiday without touching on her performance, and just how good Day is at replicating her vocal style in singing those classic songs. In addition to “Strange Fruit”, the movie features “All of Me”, “Lover Man”, “The Devil and I Got Up to Dance” some in diegetic form at nightclubs, others in merely underlying soundtrack, but they’re all effective and all wonderful to listen to. At times they add character to scenes that otherwise wouldn’t have any.
Most of the movie around her is far less impressive than Holiday herself. The script and story direction is often convoluted as major incidents of Holidays’ life are presented as mere episodes against a parallel story of the narcotics officer tailing her, and his own moral conflict over the matter. Trevante Rhodes plays this character, Jimmy Fletcher, who was apparently a real person as much as his story here seems fictitious, primarily in the romantic and sexual relationship that develops between him and Holiday in spite of her knowing who he is and what his job is. Even in all her drug-dependent misery I wouldn’t believe she’d make a judgement call that bad. Most of the movie is presented from his perspective, and its’ Daniels’ way of having his foot in two worlds, showing Holidays’ struggle and principles alongside the harshness of the government sting operation and the sheer loathsomeness of commissioner Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund). It paints a decent picture of her uphill battle but removes a chunk of her active agency in the process, while also being a poor reflection on Fletcher, who continues in his post long after he’s had good reason to leave it.
The threads aren’t terribly well intertwined either. Awkward leaps in time and circumstance are presented with little appropriate context, such as when we see Holiday in a sudden, turbulent relationship with one of her followers played by Rob Morgan, and the film loses sight of Fletchers’ purpose and makes him just another romantic interest. You also get the sense some curious omissions have been made. Tallulah Bankhead makes an appearance, played by Natasha Lyonne, seemingly to comment on the rumoured affair she had with Holiday, only for it to not go anywhere and her part to prove essentially pointless.
It’s not a surprise that I only heard of this movie in light of the awards nominations it was generating for Andra Day. Like previous Oscar season movies such as My Week with Marilyn, Brooklyn, Jackie, and last years’ Harriet (most of which are likewise biopics), it’s almost entirely held together by the strength of its’ lead performance. And Days’ is more than an exemplary one, worth seeing the movie for even amid the peripheral shortcomings. But as much as it is the dawn of a promising movie career, The United States vs. Billie Holiday itself isn’t likely to go down as one of the better entries in this genre. And yet something like Judy, another mediocre Oscar-winner from last year, doesn’t have anything as vividly stirring as that mid-film Carnegie Hall performance of the song at the heart of this movie; as passionate and as personal and as astounding as if Billie Holiday herself were singing in your living room, obliging you to listen closely.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment