Andra Day makes a memorable Billie Holiday

 

   Normally, I wouldn't say that a movie is worth seeing because of one dynamic performance. But The United States vs. Billie Holiday, provides an exception. Not only does Andra Day embody the defiant elements of the iconic singer, she also sings in ways that do justice to Holiday without becoming a self-conscious imitation.

    The drug-addicted, government-persecuted Holiday didn't have an easy life and Day finds Holiday's pain, talent, and pluck, which likely all were related. 

   Director Lee Daniels (Precious) doesn't try for the swooning romance that marked Lady Sings the Blues, which featured Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams, a movie I love for scenes between Ross and Richard Pryor, as a jazz pianist. 

   Watching The United States vs. Billie Holiday I got the feeling  that Daniels was trying to give the material the turbulent feeling of a life that bounced off a variety of men, musical opportunities,  and trouble with the FBI. 

     The approach may strike you as bleary and scattered or one that's attuned to the dizzy rhythms of a life that ended when Holiday was only 44 years old. Perhaps a bit of both.

    The movie's core connects to Holiday's performance of the song Strange Fruit, a mournful tune about lynchings in the South. The movie tells us that the FBI feared that the song might rouse protests that threatened white supremacy. 

    Daniels breezes through biographical information as he follows Holiday through the 1930s and 1940s and offers a flashback to Holiday's youth. Her mother worked in a brothel and tried to force Holiday into the trade before she reached her teen years.

   Working from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks, Daniels sketches the many relationships that defined Holiday's love life.

   Trevante Rhodes portrays Jimmy Fletcher, an FBI agent who poses as an ardent fan and develops a complex, ambiguous (even mildly incomprehensible relationship) with Holiday. Rob Morgan portrays Billie's bully of a husband. Later she takes up with John Levy (Tone Bell), a club owner and manager who also takes advantage of her. 

   Garrett Hedlund appears as Harry Anslinger, the FBI Bureau of Narcotics agent who targeted Holiday.

   Some of the movie simply falters. A mostly useless framing device features an interviewer (Leslie Jordan) who's conducting an interview with Holiday that alternates between cloying empathy and trashy rants.

    Daniels showcases the famous Carnegie Hall concert that Holiday staged when she lost her Cabaret License and no longer could play New York's clubs.

    Sometimes the movie flings things at us and then races  forward. The screenplay briefly flirts with the idea that Holiday had an affair with Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne), for example.

     Through it all, Holiday continues to sing Strange Fruit, a song written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher from the Bronx who, along with his wife, adopted the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after the couple was executed for espionage.

     Authorship aside, had Holiday never sung Strange Fruit, we might never have heard much about it. And that brings us back to Day, whose performance outlasts the movie's flaws, excesses and indulgences. It's something to see.

    

'Mudbound' tells an epic story of race

Mudbound, the big-screen adaptation of a novel by Hillary Jordan, has had a limited theatrical release but is available to all Netflix subscribers. Director Dee Rees (Pariah) tells the story of two families, one white, one black -- both living in Mississippi before, during and just after World War II. The white family consists of Henry McCallan (Jason Clarke), a farmer who's forced onto a muddy, unproductive parcel of family land after a swindle destroys his dream of striking out on his own. Henry lives with his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan) and his kids. He's later joined by his brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), a dashing young man who becomes a pilot during the war and returns home as an emotionally wounded hero. The vile patriarch of the McCallan family (Jonathan Banks) spews his racism with the bitter snarl of a man expectorating spittle from tobacco juice. The movie's black family -- the Jacksons -- are tenant farmers living on McAllan land. Rob Morgan portrays Hap Jackson, a hard-working father who hopes someday to own his own piece of land. Mary J. Blige (in a finely controlled performance) portrays the mother of a family that includes a son (Jason Mitchell) who joins the Army when war breaks out. Not surprisingly, Mitchell's Ronsel returns to Mississippi to face the kind of racism he never experienced while serving in Europe. Rees allows each of the characters to deliver some of the movie's off-screen narration, sometimes bringing moments of poetic grace to the proceedings. It's not difficult to see where Rees's drama is heading once Jamie and Ronsel become friends, but the movie unfolds with stature and sorrow. A strong collection of vividly drawn characters carry Rees's epic American story to a conclusion in which pain can't entirely trample hope.

A movie star meets his demon

Mojave is the kind of failed movie that offers occasional glimpses of what might have been, most of them concentrated in Oscar Isaac's impressively inflated performance as Jack, a dangerous loner who encounters a dispirited movie star (Garrett Hedlund) who has taken a solitary trip to the desert. Headland's character seems to be engaged in a metaphoric pity party: He wants to escape the pressures of fame that have plagued him since his teen years. Jack may quote Shakespeare, but he comes on like a demon sent to taunt Hedlund's Thomas. In a line that sounds more like it derives from a term paper than a living character, Jack tells Thomas he's into "motiveless malignity." After a pivotal incident, Thomas returns to LA, but we know that Jack won't be far behind, and that he'll bring violence with him. It's possible to view Jack as more a figment of Thomas' imagination than a real character. After all, Thomas has been living an unreal celebrity life for years. Writer/director William Monahan, who wrote the screenplay for The Departed, can't quite balance this screenplay's contempt for Hollywood with elements of film noir and silly bursts of intellectualism. Whatever is intended, Mojave proves only intermittently arresting.

'Country Strong' is weak on insight

No faulting Gwyneth Paltrow, but Country Strong sings a wobbly tune.

No amount of country spunk can conceal the pain that ripples through the life of Gwyneth Paltrow's Kelly Cantor, a country/western superstar who has hit a bad patch. When she was five months pregnant, a drunken Kelly fell off a Dallas stage and lost her baby. She hasn't been the same since. Well, who would be?

Country Strong, the movie about Kelly's attempted comeback and her on-going tussle with fame, boasts some decent music, but it plays as if writer/director Shana Feste built it around the mistaken notion that a dash of drama, a carload of accents, a bit of sexual intrigue and a dollop of show business cynicism add up to a satisfying big-screen experience.

They don't, and Country Strong winds up tasting a bit like last night's binge. A whole lot of tears have been shed in it, but the beer's still stale.

The movie opens with Kelly in rehab, where she's met Beau (Garrett Hedlund), a handsome young man who likes to sing, and who plays fair guitar. Beau's also destined to become part of a love triangle involving Kelly's husband and manager, played by real-life country star Tim McGraw, who appeared opposite Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.

It's an index of something gone wrong that McGraw, whose acting ability may be too under-developed to catch all his character's complexities, doesn't sing. Just about everyone else does. The singing actors are all pretty good, although Paltrow's mostly kept away from microphones until a climactic show in Dallas, where Kelly's supposed to make a redeeming comeback.

To thicken the movie's country stew, an aspiring singer (Leighton Meester) becomes Kelly's opening act. Meester's Chiles Stanton is unashamedly ambitious, and once she overcomes a tendency to freeze on stage, she's pretty darn good. Of course, she's also eager to use Kelly in order to advance her own career.

The movie's music isn't half bad, but the ethos that pervades Country Strong seems to have been fabricated from a substance that can be found behind many bulls in many country fields. It goes something like this: Some singers - that would be Hedlund's Beau - are pure. They sing because they love the music, and don't give a hang about adulation. Give 'em a bar on a Saturday night and a thumpin' back-up band, and they're happy as farmers on government subsidy.

Fame, we're told, is not compatible with love, which may be why poor Kelly has allowed her life to spiral toward the bottom of a Smirnoff bottle. Fame has killed the love in her. Well, almost. She seems to feel something for a baby quail that she rescued from a field and keeps in a tiny box. The bird, by the way, eventually vanishes from the picture without explanation.

Confusion reigns when it comes to the love we find in Country Strong. McGraw's James loves his wife, but holds himself back from her, probably because he can't forgive her for being drunk and losing their baby. He's tied to her by what's left of his love and a need to feed off what remains of her career.

Beau, who's recruited for Kelly's comeback tour, seems to have genuine feelings for her, but he also develops a relationship with Leighton's Chiles.

Hey, I'm all for love, even when it takes a few detours, but none of these relationships have as much depth of feeling as a fine country tune, and Country Strong isn't exactly brimming with revelation or a sense that it's grasped something essential about the world of country music. Put another way, it's not likely to do for Paltrow what the role of Bad Blake did for Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart; i.e., win her an Oscar.

Oh well, Paltrow's already won one for Shakespeare in Love, which may prove that she's better off with an English accent than a country twang.

But acting isn't the issue here. Paltrow knows how turn on the charm (watch her in a scene in which Kelly visits a Make-A-Wish child); Hedlund, last seen in the 2010 edition of Tron, has shufflin' credibility; and dang if Meester isn't convincing as a squeaky-clean and perky singer with a less than pristine backstory.

I can't say I hated watching Country Strong, but, like Kelly, it badly needed a trip to rehab - not the kind with shrinks, but the kind with screen doctors who might have been able to give its shopworn story a makeover.

'TRON: Legacy:' a mixed second helping

28 years after the original, Disney's back with a sequel to Tron. Wish I could say that TRON:Legacy was worth the wait.

TRON: Legacy offers a decidedly mixed inheritance as far as sequels go, demonstrating once again that visual pyrotechnics can’t entirely substitute for an involving story. As if we needed reminding.

I say this as one who had been looking forward to TRON: Legacy, mostly because of undeniable advances in computer-generated imagery, technology that was in its infancy when TRON – regarded as a technical groundbreaker -- first hit the nation’s screens in 1982.

For the first 30 or so minutes, I felt as if my anticipation had been rewarded. Director Joseph Kosinski, who has made a major splash in the advertising world, tops the digital environment of the original, particularly for those who see the movie in IMAX 3-D.

But Legacy’s intricately imagined visual world eventually falls prey to the truth of a cliché: Familiarity breeds a bit of contempt as Kosinski’s color palette – heavy on blacks with orange piping -- succumbs to monotony. The world of TRON, which must have been intended to evoke a bedazzled succession of “wows,” begins to resemble the inside of a giant toaster oven, coils aglow.

The screenplay for TRON: Legacy hosts a mash-up of familiar themes: the search for an absent father, the desire of artificially created creatures to enter the real world and the guilt of a genius creator who hasn’t anticipated all the consequences of his well-intended invention.

A story recap seems almost superfluous in a movie that invests most of its capital in action and visual effects. Suffice it to say that young Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) enters the world of Tron to search for the father (Jeff Bridges) who vanished when Sam was still a boy. Once inside this digital world, Sam faces a series of stern tests as he tries to return to “reality” through a fast-closing portal.

Sam’s attempts to exit from The Grid, as its inhabitants refer to the expansive, artificial world, brings him into conflict with Clu, a digitally created tyrant who looks like a younger version of Bridges’ character. Why not? Bridges’ Kevin Flynn created Clu, who has turned into his evil alter ego.

Sam’s assisted in his struggle by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a digital creation with a pageboy haircut, a sleek punk look and a fashionably pallid complexion. Quorra holds the key to both mankind’s advancement and to fan boy libidos.

At one point, Michael Sheen shows up as a Grid resident with vaudevillian flare and a haircut that makes him look like a cut-rate David Bowie. He carries a cane, and prances about like someone who’s hell bent on providing arch comic relief. But to what purpose?

Like lots of other things in Disney’s somewhat juvenile helping of sci-fi, Sheen’s Zeus seems more adornment than anything else.

Kosinski does some of his best work when re-imagining the Light Cycles that became familiar in the first installment, and he deserves credit for creating a sense of dark spaciousness within the world of The Grid. But as Legacy wears on, its imagery seems to disconnect from the story, turning into more stuff to stare at, either approvingly or with disinterest depending on one's bent.

Those who go along for the Legacy ride probably won’t care that the movie boasts some of the worst dialog of the year, so lame that even Bridges (who’s likely to earn a best-actor nomination for his work in the upcoming True Grit) is forced to deadpan his way through nearly every scene. His character tries to ignite the occasional countercultural spark, but the lingo seems more dated than funny.

I wonder. Is it possible that the whole idea of TRON – penetrating a digital world – is passé? These days, such a premise seems less like sci-fi than a description of the average teen-ager’s life.

TRON: Legacy may appeal to fans of the original, as well as to those for whom visual kicks are sufficient reason to see a movie. I might have been able to join the latter group had Kosinksi done more to mix his visual pitches instead of tending toward repetition.

Like Bridge’s character, I began to feel trapped in a digital world. I don’t know how you’ll feel, but somewhere around the half way mark I started wondering where I might find the nearest exit portal.