I have a vivid memory of the first time I heard Strange Fruit. Well, first time I heard it in its entirety, as my first exposure to it at all was through Kanye West’s Yeezus… but let’s try and ignore that for the time being. I found myself curious about the sample choice from Blood On The Leaves, did some quick Googling, and found the Nina Simone version on YouTube. Specifically, this one, and the fact that I remember it being this one is down to how harrowing that experience was. The grotesque imagery in the lyrics, the pain and occasional sneer in Simone’s vocals, the photo montage of actual lynch victims; everyone else can argue about the phrase ‘white guilt’ all they damn well please, but I really have no other way to describe the rotting feeling in my stomach when all was sung and done.
I’m starting out with this because, upon first seeing the trailer for this film about the originator Billie Holiday, I felt tremors of that gut rot from years past. As such, the notion of a film about Holiday being targeted by the U.S. government over that song certainly grabbed my interest, and when Andra Day as Billie sings it herself, staring daggers directly at the camera… yeah, it’s still one of the most powerful pieces of music ever penned. Andra Day doing her own singing, with a solid resemblance to the real Billie’s jazzy affectations, adds to the effect, as does her acting chops in depicting the final decade in Billie’s storied life… kind of.
Andra Day’s performance is basically the only thing that’s holding all the other parts of this production together, as the story being told… well, it doesn’t even resemble a singular story. It more closely resembles a biopunk monstrosity, with the severed limbs of various storylines sewn together and given life through unnatural means. Part of it involves Strange Fruit and the governmental reaction to it, but there’s also Billie’s professional life and her recurringly disastrous couplings, the War On Drugs that served as pretence for the targeting, the aforementioned time frame of the last ten years of her life, and the supposed framing device of a radio interview that proves so inconsequential that I’m only listing it to drive home the point of how crowded this script is.
Much like Lee Daniels’ last writing/directing effort with The Butler, it’s so caught up in trying to depict all these different aspects of the story itself that it ends up losing any and all focus on why the story is being told at all. I’d say it’s the worst-case-scenario for a biopic, where a filmmaker tries to tell all of the subject’s story and overextends themselves, except this doesn’t even get that far. It’s so disjointed that it’s difficult to even discern what the throughline for any of this is meant to be, or if it even has one. I mean, the closest we get is the relationship between Billie and federal agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), but even that doesn’t have the proper connective tissue to work on its own, let alone when tethered to quite a few of Billie’s other romantic couplings.
Where this starts to go from frustrating to comical is with the visuals on offer, which are also all over the bloody place. Antique stock footage, digital effects meant to make new footage look like antique stock footage, sudden bursts of black-and-white colour correction, a random heroin-induced dream sequence; it’s all stylised without rhythm, without visible connection between what is shown and how it’s shown. Between the frequent heroin usage on-screen and the emphasis on all the style, it comes across like a bad Danny Boyle impression. The only time it comes anywhere near cohesion is during the concert performances, and even then, it’s only because all Daniels and DOP Andrew Dunn had to do was focus on a single person standing still on a stage. Although quite frankly, with how everyone else looks, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they found a way to mess that up as well.
The reasons to watch this movie start and stop with Andra Day, to the point where her delivery of both the dialogue and the music might be enough to recommend this despite the chaotic maelstrom that is the rest of the production. Hell, a biopic coasting solely on how well the lead actor is doing isn’t exactly a rarity with these Oscar-hungry efforts. But at over two hours in length, and without any tangible structure beyond the woman at the centre of it all, this is still an incredibly rough sit.
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