The United States vs. Billie Holiday – Billie Holiday vs. A Messy Story (Early Review)

Hyped as the last big award contender of the season, The United States vs. Billie Holiday certainly had a lot of expectation to live up to, fair or not. Sold to Hulu by Paramount, it is now upon us. Despite the good things the film may have going for it, primarily a powerhouse performance from Andra Day as the titular Holiday, it is merely an incoherent mess which is just disappointing considering what the film could have been. With a running time clocking in at over 2 hours, it becomes a challenge to make anything remotely close to a connection whatsoever to the story or characters thus making that running time feel even longer than that more often than not. Saddled with a messy and hard to follow story obsessed with jumping forward through time made it so the film could never truly gain any momentum and get off the ground. It is a series of sequences poorly tied together and lacking any kind of flow whatsoever.

In terms of its story, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is pretty self-explanatory as in the middle of the 1940s, it saw the United States government take on the famed singer (Day) in their escalation of their war on drugs by putting a racial spin on it though in reality, it was more a means to try and silence her from singing her highly-controversial civil rights ballad “Strange Fruit”. The film serves as an exploration of her complicated life as well the United States government’s attempts to take her down via an undercover operation led by black Federal Agent named Jimmy Fletcher (Rhodes). The problem with all of that was that it was simply hard to care about any of it because of said messy story which was essentially a series of scenes with little direction or purpose. However, the constant proved to be Holiday’s impeccable resilience in the face of constant adversity but her personality would not allow her to back down.

Meanwhile, the growing racial component was hard to ignore for Fletcher, one of the few Black agents in the FBI. The internal conflict could’ve been an interesting angle, balancing being Black in the FBI and persecuting a Black icon while trying to advance his own career, but that was a missed opportunity. The majority of the film was the push and pull between Holiday and Fletcher and the government shrouded by a cloud of racism and a touch of melodrama. It was unclear what was going on and where things were going therefore it becomes easy to mostly tune it out. If anything, at least The United States vs. Billie Holiday was nice to look at with decent cinematography and production design though that can only go so far. Perhaps the best part of it all were the several Holiday performance scenes that were well-shot with the biggest takeaway being Day’s sensational voice.

Along those lines, Day was easily the best part of The United States vs. Billie Holiday for her voice though the mediocre script that lacked in depth and leaned too much on melodrama did not do her or the rest of the cast any favors. While she did bring plenty of energy to the role, her over-the-top performance was hard to watch at times. Some may connect to the character more but the overly-melodramatic story and incoherent story will make that connection more difficult for others. Suffice it to say that this will be where the film lives or dies as the film does not offer much in the way of other compelling characters. While Day and Rhodes did have decent chemistry, there wasn’t nearly enough of either of them as the latter was underutilized even more.

In the end, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is an unfortunate misfire that if anything, proves that Andra Day is a star deserving of a better showcase of her talents.

still courtesy of Hulu

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.