More recently a television movie concentrated on a performance Holiday gave four months before her death in 1959,but Lee Daniels’ new movie is the first clear-eyed look at her life that we’ve seen on screen. And this time,there’s plenty of grit with the glamour.
Holiday’s life is here,with all the anger and the tragedy that helped to upend it but the film also lays out the hypocrisies behind the US’ protracted War on Drugs and how she was caught in its headlights.
The agent of her destruction was Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund),the newly installed chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. According to Johann Hanri’sChasing the Scream,the book on which this screenplay is based,Anslinger had a visceral hatred of jazz. He couldn’t do as he really wanted and round up the whole of the country’s population of jazz musicians,so Holiday would do. Beloved by both black and white audiences,she was ideal for his purposes.
This doesn’t make her a blameless innocent or a sainted hero. In her first acting role,singer Andra Day does more than catch the smoky essence of Holiday’s voice. The contradictory impulses of the woman behind it are here,as well. Daniels and his collaborator,playwright Suzan-Lori Parkes,only touch on the horrors of Holiday’s childhood with an awkwardly staged flashback but the bald facts are enough to explain why she chose to look for solace in drugs.
Harder to understand is her taste for men with a penchant for violence. Her willingness to be bullied,hurt and humiliated sits oddly with her courage,her toughness and the affection of the small entourage who accompany her on the road,sharing the good times and the bad,along with the drugs. It’s a gypsy life and Daniels captures its intimacies and the camaraderie that makes it bearable. But the loyalty of this tight little band is severely tested when she pays them with drugs instead of cash and dumps them on one of her tours,leaving them to find their own way home when her latest man turns up to drive her back to New York.