Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody
About 25 minutes into "Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody," an inarticulate, slapdash musical biopic about the famed songstress, the film reaches its high point: Arista Records head Clive Davis ( Stanley Tucci ) enters the nightclub where Houston ( Naomi Ackie ) and her gospel legend mother Cissy Houston ( Tamara Tunie ) are performing. When the latter sees the A&R man taking his seat, she fakes losing her voice, clearing the way for her daughter to sing "The Greatest Love of All." Her vocals climb, soaring to the familiar majestic heights that catapulted her toward stardom. We watch Davis watch her. In one close-up, you can almost imagine dollar signs dancing around his head. The scene is so stirring one woman in my screening pulled out a lighter and waved her flame to the rhythm of Houston's unforgettable vibrato.
During that brief scene, you can imagine "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" gravitating toward a clear-eyed narrative about the annihilation of a voice, talent, and person by flattening her identity for the commodification of an image. But in working with an unfocused script by Anthony McCarten (" Bohemian Rhapsody "), director Kasi Lemmons flounders when rendering the woman beyond the tabloid cliff notes of her life.
"I Wanna Dance with Somebody" takes great pains to craft an intuitive throughline for Houston's life, as we briefly open in 1994 at the American Music Awards before flashing back to 1983 in New Jersey. But how Lemmons ultimately maneuvers back to the AMAs makes little emotional or logical sense.
Still, for a short time, we're ready to absorb the saga with Lemmons. We see Houston (her friends call her "Nippy") meeting and forming a lesbian relationship with Robyn Crawford ( Nafessa Williams )—Lemmons should be complimented for not avoiding this portion of the singer's personal life. Houston eventually signs with the steadfast Clive Davis, takes advice from her parents Cissy and the selfish patriarch John Houston ( Clarke Peters ) to tone down her butch image in lieu of becoming America's princess. Soon enough, she begins racking up hits. Unfortunately, these scenes rush by, to the point that their brusque speed fools you into believing that Lemmons is merely trying to get to the real story she wants to tell.
But that story never arrives. Instead, the film hops and skips through the highlights of Houston's career: making the music video for "How Will I Know," choosing the demo tape of the titular "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" from Davis' pile of cassettes, and performing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Super Bowl XXV. All the while, hampered by her drug addiction, her relationship with Crawford frays. Instead, she chooses her image, career, and desire for Bobby Brown (played by Ashton Sanders , who gives the R&B singer a bundle of tics and a vocal cadence alarmingly close to DMX).
The editing choices by Daysha Broadway ("Insecure") are driven by a bare necessity to advance the narrative but not any emotional momentum. Some of her dissonant decisions are unintentionally comedic in an "It's so bad, it's entertaining" way, like when Houston's father threatens his daughter with litigation from his hospital bed—the next cut is to his funeral.
And the way that Lemmons stages certain scenes doesn't cohere with how humans communicate. One sequence, occurring in the singer's dressing room, sees Crawford, Houston, and Brown discussing business. Rather than cutting between each person, Lemmons stages the trio in a three-shot in which they don't face each other but stare awkwardly into a dressing room mirror, giving the appearance of them stiffly speaking to their reflections.
We never get a sense from this film of Houston as a person; Ackie might as well be a hologram performing these songs. Her marriage to Brown lacks a visible arc; the role that Crawford played in Houston's life after Brown entered is never discussed (though Williams pulls some laughs through her energetic verve); and Cissy and John serve little purpose (Peters makes some very odd, grating choices). But you can't blame any of the actors for coming up short. The script, the editing, the cinematography, and every component of what makes a movie—aside from the impeccable costuming—undermines the performances here.
The jukebox element of a musical biopic will always prove a hit. The film, however, must be as transcendent as the songbook. None of the performances, unfortunately, are filmed well by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (" The Hurt Locker "). The lighting proves inconsistent, and his shaky cam style plays incongruously with the musical staging. Only the tunes themselves make these scenes remotely watchable. It's a sad development, and for a director of Lemmons' caliber, it is particularly shocking.
It's never clear what destination this film is heading toward, or what climax we're climbing up to. The score by Chanda Dancy turns unbearably soapy and melodramatic as we fast-forward to Houston's 2009 performance on Oprah, and then her life in Los Angeles in 2012. These events are boxes on a checklist. They would bloat the movie if a scene ever played long enough to fulfill the definition of a scene.
What did Black superstardom mean during the 1980s? What does the erasure of Houston's queer relationship and its modern acceptance say about the strides we've made in Black queer representation? Who was Houston as a mother, as a businesswoman, and as the leader of her career? The script asks these questions but never takes any considerable interest in their answers.
Much like with " Respect ," last year's Aretha Franklin biopic, the events here all feel meaningless when trying to hit every point of Houston's life. We do arrive back at the AMAs performance, a high-wire vocal act that thrills yet doesn't provide an exclamation point to the biopic. The credits then feature clips of the real-life Houston performing, once again undermining Ackie's turn as the singer. The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.
Now playing in theaters.
Robert Daniels
Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the New York Times , IndieWire , and Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Times , and Rolling Stone about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.
- Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston
- Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown
- Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis
- Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford
- Lance A. Williams as Gerry Griffith
- Tamara Tunie as Cissy Houston
- Clarke Peters as John Houston
- Daniel Washington as Gary Houston
- JaQuan Malik Jones as Michael Houston
- Kris Sidberry as Pat Houston
- Tanner Beard as Günther
- Bailee Lopes as Bobbi-Kristina (8-10 Yrs old)
- Jennifer Ellis as Lisa Hintelmann
- Anthony McCarten
Cinematographer
- Barry Ackroyd
- Chanda Dancy
- Daysha Broadway
- Kasi Lemmons
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‘Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ Review: Her Lonely Heart Calls
This film from Kasi Lemmons is a jukebox retelling of Whitney Houston’s parabola from sweatshirts to sequins.
By Amy Nicholson
No one could sing like Whitney Houston, and Kasi Lemmons, the director of the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” only rarely asks her lead, Naomi Ackie, to try. This is a jukebox retelling of Houston’s parabola from sweatshirts to sequins, from church choir girl to tabloid fixture, from her teenage romance with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), the woman who would continue on as her creative director, to her volatile marriage to Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders), who slithers into the movie licking his lips like he’s hungry to eat her alive.
Those beats are here. But it’s the melodies that matter, those moments when Ackie opens her mouth to channel Houston’s previously recorded songs. We’ve heard Houston’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” countless times, and Lemmons bets, correctly, that the beloved hit will still seize us by the heart during the rather forthright montage she pairs with it, images of Houston marrying Brown, birthing her daughter Bobbi Kristina and honoring Nelson Mandela underneath a sky filled with fireworks.
Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable. The screenwriter Anthony McCarten seems to find that the woman underneath the pop star shell was still struggling to define herself at the time of her death at the age of 48. We see her raised to be the mini-me of her mother, the singer Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie), complete with matching haircut, and then handed over to a recording label to be transformed into America’s Princess, a crown she wore with hesitance, and, later, resentment. (Stanley Tucci plays her friendly, Fagin-with-a-combover Clive Davis of Arista Records, who also produced this film.) At Houston’s final “Oprah” performance, recreated here, she belts an earnest ballad called, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.”
Houston didn’t write her own material; she just sang like she did, courtesy of Cissy’s fastidious coaching. “God gives you a gift, you got to use it right,” Cissy lectures. Yet, Houston as seen here can only say yes or no to other people’s ideas of what she should sing, wear and do. (A camera pan suggests, unconvincingly, that Houston thought of the film’s title track as a love song to Crawford.) Increasingly, she chooses opposition. Her successes are shared — and her money swallowed up by her father (Clarke Peters), who was also her manager — but her mistakes are all hers. (Even though Lemmons takes care to include a scene in which Houston absolves Brown of her crack addiction.)
Houston’s defiance is the movie’s attempt to answer the great mystery of her career: why she deliberately damaged her voice through smoking and hard drugs. “It’s like leaving a Stradivarius in the rain!” Davis yelps. The trouble with a gift, the film decides, is it went undervalued by Houston herself, who assumes she’ll be able to hit bombastic high notes every night of her poorly reviewed final world tour. In this doomed stretch, the camera creeps so close to Ackie that you can count the beads of sweat on her nose. The smothering is heavy-handed, yet apropos for an artist who never had the space, or creative motivation, to fully express herself.
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody Rated PG-13 for drugs, cigarettes and swearing. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.
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