Best Actress Showdown: Pieces of a Woman & The United States vs. Billie Holiday

It is a common phenomenon that the nominations for Best Actress and Best Picture are out of sync, where women are nominated for searingly good performances in movies that are otherwise mediocre. So when the Oscar nominations were announced, I discovered I needed to watch Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman and Andra Day in The United States vs Billie Holiday. I embarked on this journey with trepidation, assuming that while the performances would be great, the movies would be awful. I was half right.

Pieces of a Woman: I don't know if I'm grateful that I got to watch this movie at home. Full disclosure, I watched the first half hour at night, and then finished the rest of the movie the next afternoon because I needed a break. It opens with a thirty-minute birth scene that is raw and intense and is kind of the reason Kirby got this nomination. We get one long tracking shot that follows her from the moment she starts having contractions, to when her water breaks, to her momentary panic when her partner (played by Shia LaBeouf) discovers her midwife won't be able to make it, to the acceptance of the substitute midwife (played by Molly Parker), to the pain of giving birth, to the anxiety of not quite knowing what's going on, to the joy of delivering the baby, and then...things go wrong.

Spoiler alert: the baby dies, and what follows is a movie about how Martha (Kirby) deals with the grief of losing a child, while her family is increasingly distressed and opinionated about how she needs to do a better job of expressing her grief (which is always oh so helpful). There's also the matter of prosecuting the midwife for negligence, and for a while this movie appeared to dangerously veer into territory of questioning midwifery and home births, but I was ultimately quite satisfied with the resolution. 

Directed by Kornel Mundruczo, from a screenplay written by his partner Kata Weber, this movie is actually based on a play the two of them wrote about their own experience of losing a baby after a failed pregnancy. As such, there's an emotional resonance to this film that is hard to ignore. I also appreciated the artistry of the film - several scenes, including that first birth scene, are shot in one long continuous take, which sucked me in and kept me watching even at times when the going got tough and I wanted to wrench my eyes away. There are also some beautiful shots of a bridge and the Charles River used to showcase the passage of time, and some bizarre moments that stuck with me, like when Kirby sticks a cigarette butt on an exercise ball she's sitting on and slowly deflates. You can also watch the evolution of Kirby's nail polish throughout this movie - it's chipped when she's at her most vulnerable, then she's clearly gotten a manicure as she's trying to put herself back together. Those little details signify a care and attention that make this movie so visually compelling.

Kirby was extraordinary throughout in her portrayal of Martha's slow evolution through the stages of grief, but I also want to shout out Molly Parker, who simply looked and acted exactly like all the midwives I've seen. She exudes a kindness and warmth that makes this story all the more tragic, and while she doesn't get that much screentime, she's very effective with what she gets. I was less enthused by Shia LaBeouf and Ellen Burstyn, who more often delivered affected performances that would remind me this was originally a play. But overall, this is a powerful movie that is well worth your time. Try to stick through it in one sitting for maximum impact, but obviously, I can't judge you if you don't. 

The United States vs. Billie Holiday: First, let's talk about that voice. Andra Day, who plays iconic jazz legend Billie Holiday, has absolutely nailed her voice in this movie. She did so by smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot of gin to give it that gravelly quality. Considering Day's actually a singer and should absolutely not be roughening up her vocal cords in this manner, you can see why the lady already deserves an award for that kind of acting commitment. In addition to the voice, she absolutely nails this performance with every look and action. She is wholeheartedly committed to telling Billie Holiday's story and at no point was I distracted by her performance. It was sublime.

But oh this movie is terrible. It goes off the rails so fast and I really couldn't find anything to like about it apart from Day and the gorgeous costume design by Paolo Nieddu. Written by Suzan-Lori Parks (partly based on the book Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari) and directed by Lee Daniels, this film is an incoherent jumble, employing an unnecessary flashback structure (at one point there's a flashback within the flashback, so it all becomes very Inception), and provokes an incredible amount of narrative whiplash as you move from one scene to the next with wild abandon and no proper transitions. No Best Editing nominations here. Also, no Best Cinematography noms either: I think Lee Daniels thought he needed to smear Vaseline on the camera and then occasionally switch to black-and-white to remind us that this was a movie set in ye olden times, but all he succeeded in doing was make scenes occasionally look oddly blurry and then confuse my retinas as the color went in and out for no good reason. 

There's also an incredible amount of exposition being delivered by the very concerned men in Billie's life who talk about how fragile she is and the traumas she faced in her childhood. But then we get to see those traumas via flashback anyway, so how about we simply show, and don't tell? This is a visual medium after all, you don't have to explain every moment with dialogue. The same is also true of the many moments in the film where we get to see Billie on stage singing many classic songs. Are these wonderful songs? Yes. Do we need to hear all of them in their entirety when they don't serve to push the narrative forward? Nope. Also, this movie has way too much nudity. The affair Holiday has with an FBI agent was completely fictional, and it added nothing to the movie except forcing Day to take her kit off, which is bitterly ironic as the entire movie is about Holiday constantly being exploited by the men around her. The nudity was particularly startling to me after I had just watched Pieces of a Woman, a movie that literally forces you to watch a woman give birth, and yet you never see her completely naked. Come on.

It's unfortunate that this movie is out at the same time as Judas and the Black Messiah, another movie that features the FBI targeting a Black person for their political activism and pitting Black people against each other. That movie told a much more compelling story, but in this film, while yes, Day does manage to stir up your empathy for her heinous treatment by the FBI, the script is so choppy and the other actors are simply going through the motions that there's nothing you can really hang on to. (Speaking of the actors, Natasha Lyonne as Tallulah Bankhead was an unintentionally hilarious cameo.)  So yeah - watch this movie if you want to understand what all the fuss is about regarding Day. But spare yourself if you're in the mood for a good movie. That's not what you're gonna get.