Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody hits theaters on Dec. 23, 2022.
The music biopic is among the most stale and predictable of Hollywood’s modern “prestige” pictures. In the case of Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (hastily re-titled to add the singer’s name earlier this month) when a director as capable as Kasi Lemmons gets sucked into the subgenre’s orbit, but remains unable to elevate the story beyond its rote formulism, it might be time to retire – or, at the very least, strongly re-evaluate – the concept. Then again, if Freddie Mercury movie Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t its death knell, despite the uncanny resemblance to parody movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, we may have no choice but to accept that Wikipedia articles in the guise of movies will continue to exist side by side with their note-perfect send ups. Weird, if you’ll recall, came out just last month.
If that means grading these films on a curve, then sure: watch I Wanna Dance With Somebody because Houston was an icon. However, know that she deserves a better movie than just another youth-to-death checklist with an addiction detour, but no coherent sense of time or causality (the kind that Baz Luhrmann could only make work in Elvis by turning it into a pop-fueled fever dream). Watch it because Naomi Ackie shines in the title role, and watch it because Lemmons manages to extract an ounce or two of humanity from the script by Anthony McCarten — who, by the way, was the offender behind not only Rhapsody, but a slew of average-at-best award season biopics, from The Theory of Everything to The Darkest Hour. His next film in this mechanical genre is about experimental pop artist Andy Warhol and neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It can’t help but read like a cruel joke where the audience is the punchline.
The longer you stare at I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the more you notice its “For Your Consideration: Best Picture” watermark stamped across every scene. It begins in New Jersey in 1983, just before a 20-year-old Houston is discovered by record executives at a local performance — an event which we are, of course, treated to in detail. The film’s initial scenes are among its strongest and most intimate, between the introduction of Houston’s parents, tough Gospel singer Cissy (Tamara Tunie) and streetwise manager John (Clarke Peters), as well as her first meeting with the boyish Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), with whom Houston would have a relationship that would eventually turn into a friend-and-manager role. The script, however, not only takes liberties with how they met — they were both counselors at a summer camp, but the movie’s neighborhood meet-cute speeds things along — but when they met as well. In real life, it was 1980; Crawford was 19 while Houston was only 16, but the film avoids any potential entanglements and complications with regards to their dynamic.
This trend continues for much of its runtime. Issues and complexities are swept under the rug no sooner than they arise, leading to condensed scenes with little conflict to behold. Hurdles like Houston and Crawford being spotted in public briefly arise, as do accusations levied against Houston’s music for not being “Black enough,” but the story ends up unconcerned with these vectors of queer and racial identity beyond mere passing mentions. Before we know it, any fights or eruptions over these problems, especially between the leading couple, are long in the past, having been resolved off-screen. The script’s modus operandi isn’t meaningful drama, but rather, speeding forward to tick off all the predetermined events on its checklist during its 146 minutes, despite Lemmons’ greatest efforts.
Those efforts are occasionally noticeable, at least. Lemmons wasn’t the first director attached to the project, but she made for a promising addition as the filmmaker behind Harriet, her Harriet Tubman biopic (which she also co-wrote) that avoided the historical speedrun treatment by doubling as a tale of faith and mysticism. I Wanna Dance With Somebody has no such flourishes, but Lemmons is also a distinctly humanist filmmaker. So, while the movie charges forward from scene to scene with little resonance between events, the scenes themselves occasionally reveal hidden dimensions to each character, given Lemmons’ lingering closeups.
This is helped greatly by the performances. They’re worthwhile across the board, between Williams’ silently pained conception of Crawford, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Houston’s kind record executive confidant — granted, Davis was one of the movie’s producers, so he ends up valorized as a guardian angel — and Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders as an explosive, manipulative, and surprisingly layered Bobby Brown, Houston’s eventual husband. Tying it all together is Ackie, a star of the highest caliber, who paints her version of Houston not only with nuance, but a radiant and alluring presence befitting of the music icon.
However, the film’s use of that grand iconography is usually dull. The title, for instance, is taken from one of Houston’s greatest songs, and while its inception in the story hints at a struggle between soul and populism — between artistry and selling out — there’s eventually no such conflict. Her work often comes into existence without meaning or dramatization, once again adhering to the movie’s checklist structure. “And then this happened. And then she recorded that song. And then she gave this performance,” and so on. There’s no soul to it.
Worse yet, the story’s ending hinges on knowing the exact timeline and circumstances of Houston’s premature passing, which it only hints at obliquely. It’s too afraid to get its hands dirty in service of telling an actual story about a real and messy person, one with any kind of agency beyond the ways she may have been victimized — Houston’s estate was closely involved with the production — resulting in a half-remembered recollection of sanded down events, rather than rigorous, impactful drama.
It’s yet another entry in Hollywood’s discography-as-intellectual property genre, where the real human beings behind art don’t matter nearly as much as the work and image they produced, now re-packaged and re-commodified for consumption once again. Few things are more ironic.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/whitney-houston-i-wanna-dance-with-somebody-review