The Unit­ed States vs Bil­lie Holiday

Attempts are being made to both have and eat cake in Lee Daniels’ some­times sump­tu­ous, often labo­ri­ous, occa­sion­al­ly nerve-tin­gling biopic, The Unit­ed States vs Bil­lie Hol­i­day. It may not look like it, but this is a cut and shunt movie, where two sep­a­rate chas­sis have been fused togeth­er and then inel­e­gant­ly hid­den under a pret­ty paint job.

One is a lin­ear account of the trag­ic life and career of post­war jazz chanteuse Bil­lie Hol­i­day, played with a heady sur­feit of gus­to and verve by Andra Day. The oth­er is a miss-cued take on the state-spon­sored racial oppres­sion insti­gat­ed by the FBI with the inten­tion of help­ing Black folks in Amer­i­ca to not get too greedy in the light of any new­ly-won freedoms.

These two chunks of the movie strug­gle for nar­ra­tive dom­i­nance, and there’s nev­er a point where they achieve a sat­is­fy­ing syn­chronic­i­ty. We always have a lit­tle bit of Holiday’s life as an artist, fol­lowed by an episode regard­ing the fed­er­al pin­cer-move­ments to keep her out of the pub­lic eye. The rea­son that she became the sub­ject of such intense per­se­cu­tion was down to the fact that the song ​‘Strange Fruit’ was not only a reg­u­lar in her live reper­toire, but was fast becom­ing a hit across America.

Indeed, there were those who would flock to her con­certs just to hear this haunt­ing torch bal­lad whose lyrics paint a des­o­late and vivid pic­ture in the wake of a south­ern lynch­ing. For the FBI, it was seen as hav­ing pow­der-keg poten­tial – a reminder of white atroc­i­ties that had yet to recede into the past.

Gar­rett Hedlund’s Har­ry Anslinger is the man on a mis­sion to take down Hol­i­day by hook or by crook, and know­ing he’s got noth­ing on her for sub­ver­sive polit­i­cal poet­ry, decides instead to zero in on her leisure-hours drug depen­den­cy. She’s crim­i­nalised for her dress­ing room antics, and despite her defi­ance in the face of var­i­ous legal and health pres­sures, her career (and, indeed, life) is cut dras­ti­cal­ly short.

If the film achieves any sense of emo­tion­al acu­ity it’s through Day’s skulk­ing, tor­na­do-like per­for­mance that man­ages to cap­ture Hol­i­day as a con­fused, change­able, charis­mat­ic and forth­right song­bird who con­stant­ly over­came wide odds, only to be met with a host of new troubles.

For Daniels, this is per­haps his most mature and restrained film, and con­tains a num­ber of pas­sages where the styl­is­tic flour­ish­es coa­lesce into some­thing tru­ly mag­i­cal, name­ly a cen­tral night­club per­for­mance which cap­tures ​‘Strange Fruit’ in a sin­gle, goose bump-induc­ing take. There are moments where you might even com­pare the film favourably to Pedro Almod­ó­var at his most opu­lent­ly roman­tic (there was a time, inci­den­tal­ly, when Almod­ovar was set to make Daniels’ dis­as­trous kitsch thriller, The Paper­boy), but Daniels is left strand­ed by Suzan-Lori Parks’ awk­ward­ly seg­ment­ed script which lacks for a sat­is­fy­ing dra­mat­ic through-line, even if there are lone episodes that work well in isolation.

Anoth­er ele­ment to the mix is the pres­ence of Tre­vante Rhodes’ Jim­my Fletch­er, a green­horn FBI enforcer who is select­ed to invei­gle his way into Holiday’s inner cir­cle as a spy and report back on any­thing that’s action­able. Ini­tial­ly he is loy­al to the badge, but soon realis­es he’s being tak­en for a dupe and allows his true feel­ings for Hol­i­day to take hold, and the real­i­sa­tion of their affair, and the con­stant shift in pow­er dynam­ics as to who has the moral upper hand, is cer­tain­ly one of the more appeal­ing aspects of this way­ward production.

Yet you’re con­stant­ly made to feel con­scious of the fact that this sto­ry is being told with blunt alle­gor­i­cal intent, to work mere­ly as a his­tor­i­cal illus­tra­tion of the injus­tice and bru­tal­i­ty suf­fered by Black peo­ple with­in the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem. Holiday’s life is sold down the riv­er some­what at the ser­vice of a jour­nal­is­tic tirade that sore­ly lacks for nuance and a clear focus.