Film Review: “The United States Vs. Billie Holiday”
Juanita Crider
Released in February 2021 and available via streaming on Hulu, The United States Vs. Billie Holiday is directed by Lee Daniels and the screenplay is written by playwright Suzan – Lori Parks. Parks developed her screen play from the book, Chasing the Scream: The First and the Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. Marketed as a biographical film, viewers may be slightly disappointed because the focus of the film centers on the last ten years of Holiday’s life and career. However, there are references to her childhood and earlier life interspersed throughout the film, in somewhat fragmented vignettes, that attempt to offer insight on Holiday’s emotional turmoil and often tragic life choices. This movie plays more like a memoir which traditionally usually focuses on specific moments and periods of a life, for example, personal experience, intimacy and emotional truth. The narrative of the last years of Holiday’s life are filled with an abundance of opportunity to view her through the above lenses.
Holiday is portrayed by Andra Day. Day is an experienced jazz and blues singer and gives a superb performance and captures the pain, angst, turmoil and Holiday’s passionate performances. Her embodiment of Billie Holiday earned her the 2020 Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture and an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Although Holiday is the main protagonist, I argue that the song “Strange Fruit” is almost an equal lead character and because of the song’s role in Holiday’s career as a songstress this automatically positions the United States government or more specifically the Federal Bureau of Narcotics surveillance program as a supporting protagonist.
“Strange Fruit” began as a poem written in 1939 by Jewish American, Abel Meeropol. Meeropol was a high school teacher going by the name of Lewis Allan. Donald Clarke , writing in Wishing on the Moon; The Life and Times of Billie Holiday, describes the song as “ the pivotal vehicle of Billie's career” (174). It is important to note, as Clarke reminds readers, that in 1939 it was very difficult to know the exact number of Blacks who were lynched in the South. Lynchings were most often not reported as crimes or if they were they were underreported and not taken seriously by local southern law enforcement who unfortunately were frequent participants in condoning the violence (177). During the same period the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were actively pursuing an anti-lynching campaign which called for federal legislation and covered prominently in African American newspapers across the country. The song came to Holiday via Barney Josephson. Josephson was the founder of Café Society where Holiday would first perform Strange Fruit. Located in Greenwich, New York, Café Society was one of the only clubs were audiences were integrated. Allan had put the song to music and Josephson shared it with the café production manager (174). As portrayed in the movie Holliday was a regular performer at Café Society and the production manager immediately believed the song was for her. Initially Holiday seemed to be ambivalent about the song. Clarke writes Holiday was said to respond to the song by saying “If you think it's okay, man, I'll do it.’ ... I don't think she felt the song [at first] but there came a time when I knew she did. When Allan played it for her she just listened. Billie was very quick on learning lyrics ... but the time this was, it was the night she sang it and tears came (175). The film captures this moment and similar moments very well. Once Holiday was captured by the song herself, the staging of the song became very deliberate. The film captures this intentionality extremely well.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swaying in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter fruit.
The film’s story unfolds via flashback opening in 1957 with Holiday being interviewed by Reginald Lord Devine, played by Leslie Jordan. Devine when questioning her about the song he refers to the song as a “lyrically horrifying description of lynching.” By the time of this interview Holiday has already been to prison, arrested multiple times and has battled drug addiction for many years. The film’s use of flashback is somewhat clumsy in that the gaps of returning to the interview are virtually long enough to forget that this is the device the film employs to share the story. However, it is in these gaps where the film excels in telling the story of how Holiday was harassed by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and how the bureau’s department head seemingly made it his personal vendetta to destroy Holiday’s career. Writing in a 2015 article for Politico, “ The Hunting of Billie Holiday,” Johann Hari reveals that Harry Anslinger, the bureau’s director, perhaps was driven not only by the narcotics department’s failures during prohibition but also by his racist beliefs. For example, Anslinger wrote in internal memos that jazz “sounded, like the jungles in the dead of night. Another memo warned that ‘unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected’ in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, reek of filth” (Hari, “The Hunting”). A perusal of the digitized files available from the Federal Bureau investigation supports the film’s focus on how Anslinger used narcotics and race, encouraging the men in Holiday’s life to betray her to the feds. These documents also support the relationship between Anslinger and the few African American agents hired by the bureau, as portrayed in the character of Jimmy Fletcher (FBI Records: The Vault — Billie Holiday Part 01 of 01). There is debate as to whether Fletcher and Holiday had an intimate relationship as portrayed in the film. However, the available scholarship and primary materials suggest that Fletcher did regret his role in being used the bureau against Holiday.
The film’s focus on the specific period of approximately the last ten years of Holiday’s life provide an insight into what Daphne Brooks writes about in her recent book, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Brooks argues that “women artists like Holiday who are familiar with white supremacist violence often disassembled it through sound” (183). Despite the film’s portrayal of Holiday’s childhood and adolescent years being disjointed in an attempt to explain her interiority, the work encourages viewers to consider Billie Holiday’s place in the continuum of Black feminist sonic sound or as Brooks labels it “the complexities of Black sonic womanhood as civic activism (106).
Even through its shortcomings I highly recommend viewing the film. As a young African American girl growing up in Baltimore, Maryland Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan was part of school curriculum when studying local history. Some sources state Holiday was born in Philadelphia while others name Baltimore as her birthplace. However it is without argument that Holiday spent much of her early youth in Baltimore where her mother had once lived. This film moved me to think beyond the most common facts known about Holiday and view her as a woman whose life was plagued by poverty, family instability and devoid of tenderness who self medicated her pain with drugs and alcohol. I find myself returning to one of Holiday’s songs featured in the film, as perhaps semi-autobiographical, written by Duke Ellington “ Solitude.”
In my solitude
You haunt me
With dreadful ease
Of days gone by
In my solitude
You taunt me
With memories
That never die
I sit in my chair
And filled with despair
There's no one could be so sad
With gloom everywhere
I sit and I stare
I know that I'll soon go mad
In my solitude
I'm afraid
Dear Lord above
Send back my love
I sit in my chair
Filled with despair
There's no one, no one
No one could be so sad
With gloom everywhere
I sit and I stare
I know that I'll soon go mad
In my solitude
I'm afraid
Dear Lord above
Send back my love
Bibliography
Brooks, Daphne. 2021. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black feminist Sound. Cambridge: The Belknap Press.
Hair, Johann. 2015. "The Hunting of Billie Holiday." Politico. January 17. Accessed March 24, 2021. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298.
Investigation, Federal Bureau of. 1948 - 1949. F.B.I. Records The Vault Billie Holiday pt 1 of 1. January 25. Accessed April 3, 2021. https://vault.fbi.gov/billie-holiday/billie-holiday-part-01-of-01/view.