Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Natasha Lyonne
Intro:
…hands down the best interpretation of a female singer since Marion Cotillard’s terrific turn as Edith Piaf, and Day deserves every bit of praise she will receive.
Southern Trees bear ‘strange fruit’. So goes the solemn poetic image from the poem and song of that title. The ‘fruit’, of course, are the lynched bodies of African Americans strung up by the racist mob in the 1930s. The great jazz singer Billie Holliday made this song her own, but its ironic and angry lyric put her on the wrong side of the FBI, if not the whole of the USA, as suggested by the tittle. The FBI, perhaps realistically, considered the song incendiary and threatened to bundle Holliday off the stage if she sang it. Being as naturally rebellious as she was talented, the singer did sing it frequently and this invoked the strong arm of the law. She also had an opiate addiction, which made it easy for the Feds to hound, frame and incarcerate her. Despite all though, she was a true survivor.
In director Lee Daniels’ (The Butler, Precious) long Hollywood biopic, the focus is often on the proto civil rights clash that Holiday’s career foreshadowed. This suits the conversation of today, with echoes of the Black Lives Matter moment. It is easy to see that the knee on the neck is the lynching of today; the actual lynchings may have passed but the hatred and violence is still there.
Daniels wants us to enjoy other aspects though, and there is of course much to celebrate in the singer’s extraordinary body of work. She had that once-heard-never-forgotten breathy timbre that made every song she covered uniquely listenable.
The film will get much of its inevitable torrent of acclaim from the beautiful central performance of singer Andra Day as Billie. She is in every scene and she carries this (her first) movie with absolute aplomb. It is a brave performance involving considerable amounts of sex and nudity, as well as calling for her to act high emotions in moments of extremis. It is hands down the best interpretation of a female singer since Marion Cotillard’s terrific turn as Edith Piaf, and Day deserves every bit of praise she will receive.
The film is not flawless. It doesn’t really justify its two-hour running time, and could have been tightened. There are also several scenes that just don’t make much dramatic sense. The sort of weird love triangle between Billie and the two men who both managed her and abused her is sometimes perplexingly handled. Daniels rightly manages to get us on the side of Billie throughout, but he can’t quite work out how to show these relationships in a way that balances contemporary views of domestic violence with something that convinces as a love story.
Perhaps the question of whether it was heroin or her own self-destructive tendencies that clipped her wings will always be part of the mystery. One thing is for sure, she triumphed in history’s eyes. More or less no one would recall the name of the cops who hounded her, but every music fan knows her and her voice.
