Billie Holiday, une affaire d'État

Amazing, seasoned performance from a new actress. She nailed it, and i believe she will make it all the way to the Oscars.

The title is a tip-off that this isn't going to be a general bio-pic. It's a prosecution of a case. Director Lee Daniels has never been accused of being a subtle filmmaker, but here he and writer Suzan-Lori Parks are weilding a mighty gavel. It's a miracle than novice singer turned actress Andra Day still shines.

The basic facts here are indisputable: Billie Holiday was hounded by the government, had a series of bad marriages and died at a tragically young age (44). Still, Daniels' approach of dwelling solely on the abuses of Holiday's life, whether they be legal, physical, sexual or narcotics- related, does a disservice not only to the singer, but to the 'case' he is trying to make. Daniels uses a catalog of tricks which sometimes work - using 16mm and 35mm film for flashbacks (although using digital 'scratches' on the celluloid is a hoary cliche); And some that don't - a long heroin fueled fever dream.

What's missing here is Holiday's artistry. Her inner soul. She had affairs with famous, successful people of both sexes -- but there's no evidence here of why they would be attracted to her. Surely, she had a wit and a charm that goes beyond being an attractive famous chanteuse. Parks' script focuses on the blunt-spoken, yet needy part of her personality, not her passions.

Day does a remarkable job in a blunt, honest way that isn't all actor-ticks. And, unsurprisingly, the singer shines on stage during the performance scenes. It's a breakthrough for her, even if the film around her is in shambles. One is much better off with one of the numerous Documentaries on Holiday.

I did actually learn some things about Billie Holiday that I didn't know, namely that her song "Strange Fruit" was an anthem for racial injustice and that the FBI used drugs as an excuse to relentlessly pursue her so that they could arrest her and keep her from performing, thereby depriving her the opportunity to incite black audiences. That is the actually very intriguing kernel around which this biopic is structured, but it's diluted by the hot mess of this film's screenplay, that spends far too much time on Holiday's tumultuous relationships with various men in her life.

One of those men is FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher, who's assigned the task of following Holiday around and catching her out. He's black himself, and is subjected to the racial hierarchy within the department, so over time his allegiances switch to Holiday and he becomes her ally. Again, this is actually an interesting parallel story. But again, it's also diluted by everything else going on in this muddled movie.

Why, for example, is the character of Talullah Bankhead and the possible lesbian relationship she had with Holiday even in the film? That story is introduced and literally goes nowhere, as if whole sections of the movie were edited out at the last minute. And why do all the white FBI agents have to be played as caricature villains, as if we won't sympathize enough with the black people unless the white people are as cartoonishly awful as possible. And why does the screenplay feel the need to have characters just tell us what the movie's themes are without allowing us to come to conclusions ourselves? At one point, a black character tells the worst of the FBI agents that the department hates Holiday because she's black and beautiful and threatening (or words to that affect), to which my response was, "well duh."

And there are ridiculous sex scenes and lots of scenes of people using drugs and getting beat up and yelling and fighting. None of this bothered me because of the content, but rather because it all just becomes monotonous and traffics in the most tired of biopic tropes.

Andra Day gives an impressive performance that stands as probably the film's biggest asset. The Academy got it right when they nominated her for an Oscar but chose not to reward anything else about the movie.

Grade: B-

This version is so much more like the way I pictured Lady Day. Miss Day did an excellent job. This was raw and much better then the sugar coated Motown version. I would have given it 10 stars but it seemed very disjointed in the beginning.

I have been a fan of Billie 'Lady Day' Holiday for the majority of my life, and I thought that this movie didn't necessarily depict her life, instead it primarily focused on the government and Billie Holiday due to her drug abuse. I thought that the film depicted her in a pretty bad light, rather than depicting the amazing impact that she had on the world during the civil rights movement in the US as well as impacting the music industry, exploring the important affects and terrible, toxic environment within the industry. However, I did think that Andra Day, who played Billie Holiday, gave an amazing performance of the artist. The performances of the actors and actresses was amazing, all of them combined as they showed the raw, intimate relations between the people. However the major problem with the movie was how they depicted her life and had it primarily surrounding her drug addiction.