Lee Daniels
Harry Jacob Anslinger, who started out as a railroad bull, spent more than 30 years as commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury Department, conducting the first war on drugs, which was largely a war against jazz, blacks and the Mexican border. Much of the sinister sensationalism attributed to him (but mostly written by others) has become legend of the pothead. But the historical record tells us that these frightening tactics – stories of white teenagers driven insane and murdered by Cab Calloway – had little influence on public opinion, and that Anslinger’s own motives and statements were contradictory. For the most part, he was after budgets and bureaucratic power.
This distinction (which tells us something about the subtext of racism) does not interest Lee Daniels. Barely 15 minutes later The United States vs. Billie Holiday, a G-man declares, on Holiday’s immortal “Strange Fruit”, “People are calling this song a starting shot for the so-called civil rights movement!” It is 1947, which means that the line is not just a clunker, but an anachronism. In Daniels’ view of the tragic destruction of Holiday (Andra Day) and his simultaneous struggles with the feds, heroin addiction and his confused personal life, the forces of oppression are not directed at their own time: they are trying to maintain our most values lit down.
Daniels is obviously not realistic. Since its discovery, Precious, he developed a reputation as a director who throws everything but the kitchen sink. In fact, one cannot help thinking that what The United States vs. Billie Holiday really need is most melodrama. The material is ambitious and irresistible: Holiday’s arrest, conviction and imprisonment for drug possession, which came at the height of his popularity; its self-destructive tendency; the furor about “Fruta Estranha”; his romance with Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne) and peculiar relationship with Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), the agent for the Federal Bureau Of Narcotics who was initially sent to infiltrate his inner circle.
But the script, adapted by Pulitzer Prize winner Lori Suzan Parks from “The Hunting Of Billie Holiday,” an article by journalist Johann Hari that was later included in Hari’s book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War, is more timeline than drama. Day, who is very good, walks by with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is both a star in the green room and on stage, in the face of applause or the harsh reflection of abuse and addiction in the bathroom mirror. But many of the other characters may also be reading hint letters. (The generally reliable Garrett Hedlund, mistakenly like the vacation-loving Anslinger, is one of the most desperate examples.)
G / O Media can receive a commission
It can be argued, as Daniels is striving for, that it all comes down to emotion. Occasionally, he borrows from the best narcotic designers. There are publisher imitations Thelma Schoonmakerdissolves quickly and scenes that seem to have been adapted to the images of Wong Kar-wai movies. When things get loose and improvised, Holiday and his confidants backstage appear to have stepped out of the modern world, surrounded by repressed and repressive, who move rigidly in their suits, with frozen facial expressions.
However, this central thesis is not enough to sustain 130 minutes of film. Daniels moves on, dragging the film from one montage of sex, drugs and jazz vocal patterns to the next, stopping to sit in tyrannically lined wallpaper rooms, where the less interesting side characters are called in to explain what makes Holiday So important. Is the world cruelly closing in on the great singer? Right. But the embellished claustrophobia becomes repetitive and finally static.