Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston in the re-creation of her Super Bowl anthem in
"I Wanna Dance With Somebody."
By Dominique Paul Noth
The musical biography has been a reliable if often corny sub-genre for Hollywood. The techniques don’t vary too much. You string together the hits. You fabricate the artist’s life. Or you can partially fabricate around known events.
That’s worked for Cary Grant as Cole Porter, Robert Walker as Jerome Kern, Larry Parks in occasional blackface as Al Jolson, Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Angela Bassett at Tina Turner, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, even Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash.
You can even dig into their lives a bit to look for something more lasting -- as Respect maybe intended to do in 2021. I reviewed it then but didn’t publish till now because it offers a contrast with the better Whitney Houston bio film intended for the recent Oscars 2022 , I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Both films wanted to be considered after the 2019 success at the ceremony of musical bio “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet both failed even to be nominated, though the Houston film is far better because it didn’t duck as many life realities.
In almost all musical bio films, you invent scenes of the subject creating a riff or a tune on the fly as if they didn’t know the melody before entering the recording studio. This is always the amusing part, trying to force moments when your designated genius actually became a genius.
These manufactured moments certainly undo “Respect,” but in fairness the contrasting Whitney Houston film focuses more on the people who helped her gain fame. Her own participation in her choices for success may be exaggerated but they are limited to her listening to a song and preferring it. With eminent music producer Clive Davis as executive producer (also played sympathetically in the movie by Stanley Tucci) you accept that it tied closer to the truth.
There were abnormal hopes that true insights would emerge from “Respect,” a look inside the private, landmark, troubled and musically inventive life of Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a Baptist pastor who was already great as a child singer, went on the gospel road with Martin Luther King Jr., then invaded New York for many albums, then went to Muscle Shoals in Alabama to coax some honky-tonk white musicians to follow her lead and then never looked back as the Queen of Soul.
“Respect” is a movie stuffed to the gills with great singers who do little acting. Except for Jennifer Hudson both emoting and singing as Aretha, and Jennifer never met an Aretha wail she couldn’t master.
But first there is Aretha at age 10, dragged out onto the church circuit by her pastor father and (look out, world) sung by a true young talent, Skye Dakota Turner, playing Aretha at age 10.
A powerful number of Broadway divas play her mother, sisters and mentors (Audra McDonald, Heather Headley, Hailey Kilgore, Saycon Segbloh and Mary J. Bilge as Dinah Washington) usually singing as a bridge to other events or playing backup singers.
Director Liesl Tommy and playwright/screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson may have had a more probing idea on their minds for “Respect.” Maybe pressures from the family and the studio interfered, since both groups had influence on the project.
Their film begins with Aretha as a child but strangely ignores how Aretha became pregnant at ages 12 and 14. It lets the big-voice child singer Skye show her appeal as Aretha at age 10 and then, when a male friend invites himself into the child’s room, we fade to black, and then all we know when the lights come on is that Aretha has become a surly withdrawn girl who has to be coaxed into singing.
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| Jennifer Hudson and Marlon Waylan |
Flash forward. We meet Hudson as Aretha at age 19, casually introducing her children from a few years earlier but now flirting with men, confident of singing, occasionally breaking out in what the family terms “demons” of behavior.
It struck me that the creators were setting up a specific pattern of child sex abuse that would linger into grownup life, perhaps exploring whether it was related to Aretha’s secrecy, militant attitudes and brand of feminism. That would have been a much needed probing script. But we are only allowed to review the movie in front of us.
The film subsides into more familiar patterns – bad choices in men. Her domineering pastor father (solid work by Forest Whitaker) wants to manage her career and control her life. Her abusive husband (Marlon Wayans) then wants to manage her career and control her life. Hudson is not asked to do much as an actress, except suggest a strong will and musical intelligence inside her that the men in her life refuse to recognize.
Hits dominate any personal story. Comedian Marc Maron gets to employ his dry wit as producer Jerry Wexler, but the film winds up flipping from “and then I wrote” to “and then I noodled on the piano like a genius” to “and then I talked the label into letting me do gospel.” It’s a parade of musical challenges, the real internal dilemmas of Aretha left behind, with Hudson doing the singing.
If the film had only stuck with exploring some of the deeper domestic hints, maybe it would have snuck in to the Oscars. It was a missed opportunity. The best thing about it if you stream – about the only way left to find it since it was out of theaters in minutes -- is the conclusion under credits, borrowing footage of the real Aretha at her memorable Kennedy Center performance in 2015 shortly before her death, shedding her expensive furs singing “Natural Woman” for composer Carole King.
Turning to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” it is blunter about Whitney’s private life, even concentrating on an aspect that many of her fans didn’t see – her lesbian roots in choice of companion. (Apparently lesbianism is more palatable to movie audiences than a 12-year-old getting pregnant.) It turns out that the lesbian friend lingers on and emerges better for her than such men as Bobby Brown, who took her to the drugs and is taken to the cleaners in the film.
I suspect this touch of honesty comes from screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who also penned “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), but it is a relationship augmented by director Kasi Lemmons (who moviegoers may best remember from her acting days, as FBI training cohort of Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs”). She does well with modern film techniques, borrowing the computer graphics interface (cgi) techniques smoothly for the concert scenes, using file after file strips much as “Bohemian Rhapsody” did to create the mammoth Super Bowl crowd when Whitney sang the National Anthem.
Tucci as Clive establishes early that he may have set some great talents in motion over the decades but generally stays out of their personal lives. The film suggests he broke his own tradition a bit in Houston’s later years when her drug use was clearly limiting her soprano ability to provide those anthem slides from soft to belting on songs.
The Houston film isn’t a parade of great singers in the background, but it surprises us with the singing talent of Tamara Tunie, best known from “Law and Order SVU,” here playing Cissy Houston (Whitney’s influential singing mother).
“I Wanna Dance” is overall better acted. British actress Naomi Ackie is a strong emoter as Whitney, doing her own gospel singing but leaving the main tracks to Whitney, whom she lip-syncs perfectly. She does look a lot like her thanks to prosthetics and talent.
Tucci is sympathetic as Davis, Tunie is likeable as Cissy, Ashton Sanders is growingly hateful as Bobby Brown and veteran actor Clarke Peters perfectly conveys the one thing all these black female celebrities seem to have in common – a domineering father figure.
The Whitney film doesn’t completely solve the “then I wrote” problem with such bios, even though turning it more into “and then I sang.” It doesn’t investigate Whitney’s personal limitations deeply enough, just showing her falling into drugs to sustain her intense performing schedule. It prefers to leave us with the better image of her, but it doesn’t hide domestic entanglements as “Respect” did.
About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor.
He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain.
A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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