Andra Day burns up the screen in her first leading role in Lee Daniels' bio-drama chronicling the FBI's unabated persecution of the immortal jazz singer.
Day mesmerizes even when Lee Daniels' unwieldy bio-drama careens all over the map with stylistic inconsistency and narrative dysfunction, settling for episodic electricity in the absence of a robust connective thread. It's a mess, albeit an absorbing one, driven by a raw central performance of blistering indignation, both tough and vulnerable. Coaxing gritty, fully inhabited work from relatively inexperienced screen actors is arguably Daniels' main strength as a director.
The film's first hour gives a semi-coherent account of Holiday's highs and lows in the 1930s and '40s. But around the halfway point, the director really starts ladling in fussy stylistic flourishes — random B&W, slow-mo, jump cuts, shuffled chronology — that call attention to themselves rather than serve the story. This continues all the way through to the end credits, with a charming visual sabotaged by a jarring meta moment.
Jimmy infiltrates Billie's inner circle and gains her trust before leading an arrest for heroin possession that lands her in prison for a year. It's Fletcher's well-heeled mother who first opens his eyes to the ways in which he's being manipulated and to the courage of Holiday in using her voice to expose horrific racial violence that the white establishment tacitly condones.
One of the more affecting moments involves Billie stepping away from her relationship with Jimmy, basically telling him that his kind of tenderness is too unfamiliar for her to control, and reverting back to the slap-happy men to whom she's accustomed. It's a weakness, though, that these men are largely interchangeable — musicians, husbands, lovers, managers, often in the pocket of Anslinger and almost all of them betraying her in one way or another.
There's plenty to quibble about in terms of their placement and editing, but the musical performances are the element that ultimately saves the wildly uneven movie. Day looks spectacular in Paolo Nieddu's stage gowns and she sounds intoxicating, creating a flirtatious complicity with the audience in one song and drifting into far-off introspection in another.
Interesting review. Worth reading.
somente aguardando a crítica do DalenogareW que é a que importa
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