Eschewing that sound is a fatally bad choice. Like Billie Holiday, their voices rang out through the ages in a very distinctive way, not just what they said but how they said it. in “Selma” and seemingly going out of his way to give his speeches in a manner unlike MLK. I’m reminded of David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther King Jr. There’s no basement in her voice, just the balcony. She’s a fine singer of course, but coming from a pop background she sounds like a little girl compared to Holiday’s resonance. Instead, Diana Ross sings like… Diana Ross. Her singing style is central to her iconography. She was influenced by the instrumentals of jazz, and wanted her voice to be able to sound like a sliding trumpet, dithering saxophone or blaring trumpet as the case may be. Holiday’s phrasing of lyrics and bending of notes made her sound instantly recognizable. But she doesn’t sound anything like Holiday, which is bewildering. Ross doesn’t look anything like Holiday, which is not uncommon in biographical films.
Certainly she pales in comparison to Day, though I may be biased by having seen the more contemporary performance first. Despite earning an Oscar nomination (the film also received four others, including adapted screenplay, art direction, costumes and music), Ross just isn’t convincing as Holiday.
#LADY SINGS THE BLUES MOVIE#
My biggest problem with the movie is Diana Ross in the lead role. He plays McKay as a smooth operator who first sees her as a conquest, but comes to genuinely care for her and becomes invested in being her rescuer when she hits her downward spiral.īetween the domestic violence, opioid addiction and being hounded by the feds - not to mention being raped as a teenager - it’s no wonder Billie Holiday sang sad songs without equal. Williams is in fact the best thing about the movie, and his scenes with Billie usually have a strong emotional tug. He was also reportedly physically and emotionally abusive, a characteristic she unfortunately seemed to share with all of her other relationships. Most accounts say he was really a two-bit louse who sucked money and attention from Billie. McKay is depicted in the movie as a slick businessman with some shady aspects who nevertheless acts as Billie’s guardian and soulmate. The movie - screenplay by Suzanne de Passe, Chris Clark, Terence McCloy - pretends as if he was with her from her very start, when in fact they only knew each other during the last few years of her life. It also omits her first two husbands, centering only on the figure of Louis McKay, the part played by Billy Dee Williams.
It tracks her fight to the top in painstaking detail, wallows in her drug addiction for the middle and third acts and then skates through the last dozen years or so of her life in hasty order. Turns out “Lady” isn’t that much more accurate, despite being based on her own autobiography, co-written with William Dufty. I thought Andra Day was terrific in “United States,” though the film is somewhat slapdash and takes a lot of liberties with historical fact, up to and including concocting a romance between Holiday and the federal agent who was supposed to be keeping tabs on her. I decided to check out “Lady Sings the Blues” for two reasons: it’s out in a gorgeous new Blu-ray edition, and it’s the first major biopic of jazz icon Billie Holiday, preceding “The United States vs.