Hilton Als Really Doesn't Like Lee Daniels

Text below taken from Als' review in The New Yorker (March 1, 2021). There's obviously some history between these two. This review is total scorched earth. I do think "deep-fried-chicken-and-pain movies" is a pretty creative insult.

As an artist and a woman, Holiday belonged to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier described as lo real maravilloso (“the marvellous real”)—that which cannot be explained but is irrefutably here. I don’t want you to spend too much time on Lee Daniels’s new movie about Holiday, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (on Hulu), because you won’t find much of Billie Holiday in it—and certainly not the superior intelligence of a true artist. What you’ll find instead is an illustration of the nasty impulses that spell out Daniels’s interest in degradation. A co-creator of the Fox series “Empire” and the director of such deep-fried-chicken-and-pain movies as “Precious” (2009), Daniels has emerged as a skewed moralist, one who, although he is Black, seems to feel that most Black people are both power-mad and powerless, and therefore fodder to be pimped out, debased, and manipulated. (Full disclosure: in the late nineties, I wrote a script about Holiday that Daniels and several other producers were interested in at the time.)

Adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks from a nonfiction book by Johann Hari, “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is Daniels’s response to Sidney J. Furie’s “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972), in which Diana Ross portrayed the singer. It’s also a bid to win the Best Actress Oscar—which Ross lost to Liza Minnelli—for Daniels’s own star, the singer Andra Day. Furie showed physical and drug abuse relatively sparingly in “Lady Sings the Blues,” but Daniels’s movie explodes in an orgy of violence, sex, and shallow, predictable behavior. He can’t get enough of such things because, after all, these are Black characters, and Daniels sees the world through the kind of white gaze that Hall, for one, questions and dismantles.

Less than a half hour into this interminable flick, Holiday, who has been getting high with a guy named Joe (Melvin Gregg), says that she wants some ice cream. Joe is too far gone to move, so Holiday, in her undergarments, puts on his overcoat and is about to go out for the sweets herself when the fuzz storms in, led by a Black federal agent, Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), who, earlier, came on strong as one of Holiday’s admiring fans. While other agents handcuff Joe, Fletcher tells Holiday that the cops will be along to search her, and you wonder why he doesn’t do it himself. The answer: it would preëmpt the self-conscious drama of the following scene. Holiday, furious, calls Fletcher a “lying Black son of a bitch,” and flings off the coat, and then her undergarments, to show that she has nothing to hide, not even her tough, battered vulnerability. The scene is dead at heart because Day is not an actress and what she’s been asked to do doesn’t come from anywhere internal. The moment, like so many in the movie, is about Holiday being a bad bitch, high on her own humiliation and that other narcotic—show business.

Day is beautiful to look at, but she has no center as a performer. Her presence is a series of postures and imitative voice techniques that serve only to further etch the image of junkie mess into this portrait of a great artist who changed an art form. The movie feels like a revenge number on Blackness and whiteness—an expression of the white-power fantasy in which Black artists always lose, because Blackness is trash, or, at least, gets trashed, right here in its own back yard.