Lee Daniels (2021)

As its title suggests, Lee Daniels’s biography presents Billie Holiday as an American government target as well as a famous jazz singer.  The two aspects are fused through her celebrated song ‘Strange Fruit’, which the FBI deems less politically insightful than it is inciteful, and which is at the heart of Daniels’s narrative.  Holiday first recorded ‘Strange Fruit’ in 1939 so The United States vs Billie Holiday is concerned with the last two decades of her life; there’s just the occasional flashback to, for example, the Baltimore brothel where, as a pre-adolescent, she ran errands and scrubbed steps.  Billie (Andra Day) is repeatedly discouraged from performing ‘Strange Fruit’ and repeatedly refuses to drop it from her set.  The authorities, unable to prosecute her for this, convict her on narcotics charges instead.  The film charts Billie’s relationship with Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) who, after active service in World War II, joins the FBI but eventually quits.  His feelings for Billie grow pari passu with his disgust at the Agency’s tactics.

Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote the screenplay, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist.  Some of the comically clumsy dialogue she’s concocted makes this hard to believe.  ‘People are calling the song a musical starting gun for the so-called civil rights movement,’ says Roy Cohn (Damian Joseph Quinn) of ‘Strange Fruit’, in a pow-wow with Senator Joe McCarthy (Randy Davison) et al.  You wouldn’t guess Parks’s reputation as a playwright from the script’s construction either – or, at least, from the mess it has become in Daniels’s hands.  At the start, Billie is being interviewed by a camp journalist called Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan).  You’re primed for this to be used as a framing device.  It turns out to be just another bit – Devine returns only a couple of times throughout the whole 130 minutes.  (To be fair, the rarity of Leslie Jordan’s appearances – like several others in the cast, he’s miles over the top – is a relief.)  An exact date and place are shown on screen to introduce some sequences, but by no means all.  This seems pointless when the relationship of these scenes to other, unexplained ones is often unclear.   When Billie ‘remembers’ the events that inspired ‘Strange Fruit’, Jimmy is also part of them; she’s presumably having a bad dream so we’ve no idea what she actually experienced.  As for the songs, they’re often interrupted.  Daniels cross-cuts, for example, between Billie performing ‘Them There Eyes’ and Billie having it off.

As a singer, Andra Day sounds more like Billie Holiday than Diana Ross did in Lady Sings the Blues but so she should.  Ross didn’t try to mimic Holiday; Day does, and it shows.  She always seems to be doing an impression of the famous voice.  She captures some aspects – the huskiness, say – with a deal of skill but her vocal texture is thinner than the original’s and her mannerisms, as a result, are too salient.  As an actress, she isn’t a patch on Ross:  Day tries hard (and often looks to be concentrating hard) but she lacks emotional variety and fluidity.  There’s a further problem, albeit one now usual in biopics set in the middle of the last century.  In Judy (2019), Renée Zellweger’s disintegrating Judy Garland was too shapely and toned.  Andra Day’s Billie, for someone who has abused her body for years, looks surprisingly robust.  It appears she goes to the gym more often than she takes heroin.

Since Jimmy Fletcher might have got himself in good shape, this is less of a problem with him, despite Trevante Rhodes’s super-ripped physique.  It’s less of a problem too, of course, because Jimmy isn’t a famous person, though he was presumably a real one:  the closing legends inform us that – believe it or not! – he regretted to his dying day working for the FBI.  Rhodes, who made such a strong impression in Moonlight, is a more naturally expressive actor than Andra Day.  He’s particularly good at suggesting Jimmy’s ambivalence in the early stages – before, that is, it becomes a main plot element.  But his character, as written, is both overdone and underdone.  There are times when Jimmy’s predicament seems meant to be a representative African-American dilemma of the era – how to make a success of your life without selling your soul to the diabolical status quo – but this theme isn’t worked through.  Once he falls for Billie, the film gives only a sketchy account of how this affects Jimmy at work.

His boss there is Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), in reality the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and holder of the office from 1930 until 1962.  At one point, Anslinger tells Jimmy that ‘You looked like Nat King Cole but you sounded like Stepin Fetchit’.  Hedlund, not for the first time giving a decent performance in a bad film, has too much taste to deliver this thudding barb with the emphasis that Suzan-Lori Parks and Lee Daniels probably intended.  Louis McKay (Rob Morgan) is a minor character here compared with in Lady Sings the Blues, though around long enough for Daniels to demonstrate McKay’s violent treatment of Billie.  The film grinds glumly and tediously through to her death in July 1959.  Even when she’s in her hospital bed, Anslinger is trying to frame Billie for drugs offences.  She tells him that one day his grandchildren will be singing ‘Strange Fruit’.  Daniels implies that her prophecy is accurate and, therefore, consolatory.  At the same time, the load of text he puts on screen at the end includes the information that, as of February 2020, the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act had still not been passed by the US Senate.  A more intelligent film-maker might juxtapose Billie Holiday’s prediction and  this political reality to ironic effect; Daniels just uses them as two more attention-grabbers.   His muddled thinking puts the seal on a chaotic film.

28 June 2021