Director: Kasi Lemmons
Writers: Anthony McCarten
Stars: Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Ashton Sanders
Synopsis: A joyous, emotional, heartbreaking celebration of the life and music of Whitney Houston, one of the greatest female R&B pop vocalists of all time, tracking her journey from obscurity to musical superstardom.
It’s a miracle I was emotionally enticed by Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. I loathed Bohemian Rhapsody and despise biopics that give audiences a Cliffs Notes summary of the public figure’s lives. But there’s something different in how director Kasi Lemmons approaches Houston’s life and invites us into her imperfect movie on an imperfect artist who has always struggled in her personal life as much as she had The Voice.
Hearing Whitney’s voice on the big screen felt amazingly cathartic, even if Naomi Ackie did not provide the vocals for the star. But it almost doesn’t matter because we’re quickly pulled into her life. Houston listens to Stevie Wonder’s “All I Do” on her Walkman and meets Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams). The two will share an intimate relationship before their parents (Tamara Tunie and Clarke Peters) strip it apart to preserve her image of “America’s Princess.”
She becomes the “Princess” after singing “The Greatest Love of All,” in front of Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), who immediately signs her and becomes her record producer. Robyn becomes her Creative Director as Houston’s father starts to control everything in her life, including her marriage to Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders). Her relationship with Brown exacerbated her drug addiction, which she had struggled with throughout her life, leading to her tragic death in February 2012.
A lot is happening, and the film goes through events of her life at a breezy pace as if Lemmons is checking boxes from a list of Houston’s most significant events. And the film is edited in a rather odd structure, alternating between multiple events of Houston’s life, briefly showing one moment before cross-cutting to the other. But it all makes perfect sense.
The biggest cross-cut happens at the very beginning, opening at the 1994 American Music Awards, where she is about to sing her medley, “I Loves You, Porgy/And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going/I Have Nothing” and cutting back to her humble beginning, meeting Robyn, singing “The Greatest Love of All” and becoming the success we know her to be. The film only comes back to the AMAs at the tail end, as she is about to take the bath that will ultimately end her life, reminiscing of the time she sang the medley after meeting a bartender (Elegance Bratton) who told her about the greatest performance he’s ever seen at the AMAs in 1994.
We then get to see that performance, recreated by Ackie, and it’s far more potent than that Live Aid climax in Bohemian Rhapsody. For one, screenwriter Anthony McCarten doesn’t manipulate the audience like he did in Bohemian Rhapsody by having Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) announce he has AIDS before his actual diagnosis, so that they would bawl their eyes out once he would start “singing.” That performance speaks for itself, and ends the movie on the highest of notes, instead of doing a painstaking recreation of Houston’s death, which was my biggest fear. We didn’t need to see it, but we certainly needed to see Houston in her prime, singing her guts out and giving her all in front of millions of people, reminding us exactly why she was “The greatest Voice of her generation.”
And Lemmons loves Houston. You can tell from how Barry Ackroyd’s camera positions Ackie in the frame and paints her highest moments as a true historical triumph. Houston’s voice was triumphant and transcended barriers, as much as some people thought she was milquetoast or “not Black enough.” She proved all the naysayers wrong through her music and stunning stage presence, on tour, or when she sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl XXV, giving the greatest Anthem performance in the history of the game. All of these moments of Houston’s life are purposefully fragmented, in the sense that we don’t get to bask in the event too much before moving onto the next part of her life.
However, those fragments deftly edited by Daysha Broadway give its final scene the resonance it needs to make you ugly cry, even if you’ve never lived through Houston’s prime, or cared much about her music. It also helps that Ackie lives and breathes Houston from beginning to end, and doesn’t try to do a pale imitation of her mannerisms the way Rami Malek did in Bohemian Rhapsody. She has great chemistry with Williams who makes the most of her screentime, as does Tunie as Cissy. Though her relationship with her father is only briefly hinted at, I would’ve liked to see more of Peters, and that aspect of the film fleshed out further. As with any fragmented film, we only get a brief glimpse of instances of a person’s life, instead of the full picture.
But it didn’t necessarily matter when the final scene hit, and everything that was shown before fed into Houston’s impeccable performance. All of the small flaws dissipate, and the film becomes more than a straightforward biopic showing events of Houston’s life, but now a celebration of who she was at her best made by a filmmaker who completely admires her strongest parts and understands her vulnerabilities. It’s miraculous that a movie penned by the screenwriter of Bohemian Rhapsody would be worth watching, but Kasi Lemmons continues to prove she is a highly versatile filmmaker/actor whose imprint on cinema will be felt for decades to come.
Grade: A
