A year ago it was the broken child prodigy Judy Gardland in the fatal drift of her maturity, and now it is the turn of another fragile legend, Billie Holiday, jazz myth and target for years of the Federal Department of Narcotics of her country for her consumption of heroin.
The United States against Billie Holiday
is the new
biopic
destined to illustrate a Wikipedia script that fails to propose its own view on the artist and that limits itself to exposing without too much subtlety the ordeal that the singer suffered due to her addiction and her famous hymn anti-racist
Strange Fruit
.
The film opens with a terrible photograph of a proud and defiant group of white men posing armed for the camera while their trophy is displayed at their feet: what remains of a black man who has just been lynched.
It is not exactly the image that inspired that famous theme ("from the trees of the South hangs strange fruit / blood on the leaves, and blood on the root / black bodies swaying in the southern breeze"), written by a Jewish and communist professor , Abel Meeropol, after learning about the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, in August 1930. The film by Lee Daniels, director of
Precious
, is a long
flashback
in which a Billie Holiday that is hardly seen in Pie recapitulates about her life and about the incessant harassment and harassment she suffered by the police, ending up in jail for several years or being expelled from many New York stages for her determination to interpret a ballad with which she managed to break the circuit closed of the protest-song and whose intensity and mimicry with his own pain when interpreting it made him, according to his memories, vomit behind the scenes.
As happened to
Judy,
played by the actress Renée Zellweger in one of her best works to date, the best of
the United States against Billie Holiday
is its protagonist, the singer Andra Day, in charge of facing and supporting the entire film .
Despite her little experience as an actress, Day gives herself so fiercely to the difficult task of reliving the myth and its labyrinths that with her dedication and charisma she manages to reach a dimension in which drugs, sex and her voice are the expression of the same dramatic flight forward.
Candidate for the best actress Oscar after winning the Golden Globe, Day will again face another
blues
diva
, the pioneer Ma Rainey who plays Viola Davis in the lazy
Mother of the Blues
, as well as with more solid rivals, Vanessa Kirby by
Fragments of a Woman
,
Carey Mulligan for
A Promising Young
Woman
and the, in principle, favorite Frances McDormand by
Nomadland
.
THE UNITED STATES AGAINST BILLIE HOLIDAY
Direction: Lee Daniels.
Performers: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Natasha Lyonne, Garrett Hedlund, Rob Morgan, Tone Bell, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Evan Ross, Dana Gourrier.
Genre: drama, USA, 2021.
Duration: 130 minutes.