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.

    

'Bird Box': a wan helping of horror

Sandra Bullock joins the post-apocalyptic fray in Bird Box, a movie about a woman trying to find safety for herself and two small children. The situation is dire because the world has been ravaged by a lethal menace that, following current movie fashion, never is really defined. All that's clear is that those who have the misfortune of looking at the world will die, mostly by suicide. Normal vision has become fatal. Director Susanne Bier quickly gets down to business: Bullock's Malorie and her two charges (Vivien Lyra Blair and Juian Edwards) must negotiate a dangerous river to reach their only hope for safety -- and they must accomplish this goal while wearing blindfolds. The movie shifts between this river trip and events that occurred five years earlier when a flight to safety brought a pregnant Malorie into the home of Douglas (John Malkovich). There, a variety of refugees from the ill-defined terror try to survive. These include another pregnant woman (Danielle Macdonald) and a veteran (Trevante Rhodes) who leads an expedition (via GPS) to obtain groceries. The tensions in the house unfold in reasonably predictable fashion until the narrative catches up with itself and rejoins Malorie's river expedition. Comparisons with the far better A Quiet Place seem inevitable with Bird Box coming up a loser in any game of compare and contrast. Bullock gives a strong, fiercely determined performance; the rest of the cast is in equally good form. But in trying to surpass generic horror, Bird Box achieves only limited success.

A revealing search for identity

Tender and tough, Moonlight stays with you.

To understand Chiron, the main character in director Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, it might be helpful to understand what this young man -- shown at three different stages of his life and played by three different actors -- doesn't have.

No father guides Chiron; his crack-addicted, single mom offers no real parental support; no group of friends provides companionship; and no protector helps keep the neighborhood bullies at bay.

Such observations make Chiron sound like a sociological statistic, a black kid suffering the deprivations of an impoverished life in Miami's ironically named Liberty City. Although Chiron's deprivations constitute a valid and appropriate description, they don't go far enough.

The most important thing that Chiron lacks is a voice. What makes Jenkins's movie impressive are the ways in which he has coaxed the actors who play Chiron to be expressive without articulating the myriad contradictory feelings that whirl inside the character's head. Chiron seldom speaks.

You can (and probably should) spend time unpacking the various complex meanings in Jenkins's movie: the drug dealer who becomes a genuine father figure in Chiron's life but who, because he sells drugs to Chiron's mother, is pained by his own hypocrisy; Chiron's discovery of his gayness; or the multiplicity of causes leading to the violent explosion that criminalizes Chiron and redirects his life.

All of those things are worth discussing, but Chiron's voicelessness underlies everything worth thinking about in Moonlight.

And by voice, I don't mean only the act of speaking. I mean Chiron's ability to define an identity that's unshackled from environment and circumstance.

In the movie's first section, we meet the youngest version of Chiron, as played by Alex Hibbert. A slight kid who has been issued the nickname "Little," Chiron clearly is an outsider.

In this section, Chiron encounters Juan (a terrific Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who takes the boy under wing.

Born in Cuba, Juan sincerely cares about Chiron. Scenes in which he teaches Chiron to swim give Jenkins an opportunity to display a tender, lovely touch.

Not surprisingly, Juan's concerns land him in a territorial fight with Chiron's mother, a walking fury of woman portrayed by Naomie Harris.

When Chiron reaches his teen years, Ashton Sanders takes over the role. Of the three actors who portray Chiron, Sanders has the least physical resemblance to the others, but his acting leaves no doubt about the adolescent Chiron's connection to his boyhood self: his watchfulness, his ability to ask penetrating questions, his loneliness.

In this period, Chiron has his first sexual experience, and again tries to escape bullies. He hides from his tormentors until an irrepressible anger breaks through his muted surface.

Trevante Rhodes takes over the role when Chiron becomes an adult. By this time, Chiron has survived a stint in juvenile prison; he has bulked up, perhaps to armor himself against the world and against his own feelings. He's also living a life that mirrors the life lived by Juan.

I don't know if it's acting or physical resemblance or a combination of the two, but as this segment evolves, Rhodes reveals more and more traces of the Chiron we knew as a child.

Eventually, Chiron reconnects with a friend from childhood (Andre Holland), a reunion that leads to the movie's conclusion -- which feels like a well-earned respite from all the previous tensions, if not a triumphant moment of self-realization.

Whether you see Moonlight as a perfect movie or not, it's difficult to imagine that you won't be moved by the way Jenkins interprets and reimagines Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

It's not easy to make a movie in which the main character is less actor than one who's acted upon, less talker than one who is talked at, but Jenkins creates a richly realized world and moves us through it with insight and small moments of grace.