FEATURE:
The Best Music Biopic of 2022…
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody
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STARRING the sensational…
IN THIS PHOTO: Naomi Ackie in Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody/PHOTO CREDIT: Landmark Media/Alamy
Naomi Ackie in the title role, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a brilliant music biopic that celebrates the late icon rather than demonising or scandalising her. Ackie’s remarkable performance is responsible for many of the impassioned reviews. A superlative performance, you can tell how much effort and time Ackie spent embodying Houston to ensure that she was natural and convincing. Whilst the film uses Houston’s voice for the singing, English actor Ackie ensures that the accent and cadence is spot-on. A definite rising talent, Ackie is someone to watch closely! There have been some terrific music biopics this year (including Elvis), but I think that Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody has that extra something. Ackie is so convincing as Whitney Houston. The balance between being true to facts and also not whitewashing is just right. Rather than lingering on Houston’s troubles and addiction issues, there is plenty of celebration of the music and her undying and staggering talent. I want to bring in some articles relating to the film. Among the interesting takeaways from this article in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Kasi Lemmons (the film’s director) discusses Ackie and how she brings warmth and passion to the role:
“The screenplay for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” was written by two-time Academy Award nominee Anthony McCarten. His previous credits include the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything” and the 2019 Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Some of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody’s” scenes vividly recreate high-profile events in Houston’s life, including her bravura (albeit pre-recorded) performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl and her stunning 1994 medley at the American Music Awards of “I Loves You, Porgy,” “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “I Have Nothing.” Rickey Minor, who was her musical director for a period, including for the AMA telecast, is portrayed by Dave Heard.
But “I Wanna Dance with Somebody’s” primary source for details on Houston’s life was Clive Davis, who — as the founder of Arista Records — signed the then-teenaged Houston to his label in 1982. He spent two years helping her make and hone her debut album, then worked with her for the rest of her recording career.
But Davis, now 90, did not meet Houston until she was 17. He came in and out of her life in the years that followed, mostly in a professional capacity but also as a periodic father figure.
Davis co-produced “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” He is also a key supporting character, heroically portrayed by Stanley Tucci, in a film that presents Davis’ recollections as unquestioned fact.
Did the combination of these unusual factors mean Lemmons had an even more formidable balancing act to negotiate?
“You know, it was slightly tricky,” said the director, whose telling smile as she spoke suggested that “slightly” may be a diplomatic understatement.
‘Not a documentary’
“I’d never done that before,” Lemmons continued. “I’d never worked with an estate (of a deceased star), where every recent memory and emotion about (Houston) and how her story should be told (was so strong).
“I thought that was tremendously interesting and enriching. Clive is a wealth of knowledge and he brought all that. And Rickey (Minor) ... was also a wealth of knowledge.”
Houston did not write a memoir. If she kept any diaries, they remain a secret. Where, then, does reality stop and poetic license begin in a film that includes many private conversations?
“Naomi and I both say this film is like a poem about Whitney. It’s not a documentary,” Lemmons stressed.
“It’s a movie that has emotional authenticity, even in terms of some of the dialogue, because we were working with people who remember the dialogue. But it’s not a documentary. It’s not really Whitney.
“But it gives you Naomi’s beautiful performance and the essence of who this woman she portrays is, her triumphs and struggles. I think (there is) emotional truth and power to her performance as Whitney”.
In this feature from The Guardian about the film, Anthony McCarten, who has written the first big budget Hollywood biopic of the star, states that this new film corrects the myths and narrative of Houston being this tragic figure. In the ten years since Whitney Houston died, four films have tried to tell her story. More concerned with sensationalism and tragedy, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is much more balanced and complete. There is much more compassion and celebration – though the film does not shy away from the more heartaching and rawer moments:
“Towards that end, a great deal of the film centers on the creation and performance of her music. At the same time, that music sounds dramatically different from the way it did on the studio recordings, in live concerts or in TV performances. Everything has been buffed and amplified to take advantage of a modern movie theater’s Dolby 5.1 sound system. The result thunders right through you. All the vocals come from Houston, but the breaths of the actor who plays her, the British star Naomi Ackie, have been deftly incorporated to make the physicality of the performance palpable. “It’s got to sound, and feel, like she’s singing live,” Lemmons said. “And Naomi knew every breath of the songs.”
The depth of those breaths, and the dexterity with which Houston deployed them, are two elements that McCarten considers key to her brilliance. “Any musician who ever stood behind her during her performances would often note that this small frame of hers could magically expand,” he said “She would take in a breath with her whole rib cage. They say whales can do this when they sink miles beneath the ocean. They expand their ribs to hold enormous amounts of air. The way Whitney could hold that ballast of air, combined with the force with which she could sustain the high notes and add vibrato, was majestic.”
Of course, the high-wire drama of her music found a mirror in the constant tug between the triumphs and tribulations in her life. One controversial aspect that’s presented with more frankness and specificity than in any previous depiction is her relationship with her friend and business associate Robyn Crawford, who had no involvement in the film. While earlier works strongly implied a lesbian relationship, the new film makes it physically explicit. According to Lemmons, part of that has to do with details offered in Crawford’s memoir, published in 2019. McCarten said the public’s changing attitudes towards sexuality also played a part. “We live in a much more tolerant time,” he said. By contrast, “being open in the ‘80s was very, very difficult”, he said.
The pain of that judgment is driven home in the film by the strongly disapproving attitude towards the relationship displayed by Whitney’s father as well as her mother, Cissy Houston. Both Lemmons and McCarten believe that if Houston had come up in today’s age of non-binary pop stars like Janelle Monae and Demi Lovato, she could be fully out about her relationship with Crawford. As to how Houston viewed her own sexuality, Lemmons believes she was “fluid”, while McCarten opts for the description “bi-curious – at least in her younger days”.
The futility of placing a single label on Houston’s sexuality was something she shared with Davis. One scene in the film shows him revealing a male lover to her. While Davis didn’t talk about such things in public then, he wrote about it in his 2013 memoir. “It was important to Clive to put that in the film,” said Lemmons. “He and Whitney had that in common.”
One sexual aspect that’s notably absent from the film is an assertion made in the 2018 documentary by Kevin Macdonald that the singer had been molested by a female friend of the family when she was young. Though the estate had authorized that film, McCarten said “They were very unhappy” with the result. “They felt that Kevin had overrun the boundaries of the deal that they had,” he said. “The accusation at the center of it was unsupported by anything that (Whitney) had told anyone else. For Kevin to have based a documentary on it seemed fragile. I would have needed a substantial amount of supporting evidence to include that.”
The new film is more direct in dealing with the issues in Houston’s life surrounding race. It recreates the infamous scene at the Soul Train awards where she was booed and features a scene during a radio interview at a Black station in which the DJ echoes a common complaint of the day: that her music was “too white”. McCarten’s script has Houston calling out the inherent racism in that view with righteous clarity. At the same time, such accusations wounded her deeply. “To have your own people calling you an ‘Oreo,’ is extraordinarily painful,” Lemmons said. “I would certainly hope that the conversation would be different now.”
The lack of nuance in Houston’s day underscores the pain she experienced for falling on a fault line of assumptions about both race and sexuality. Worse, she had battles within her own family, most notably with her father, who served as her manager. Shortly before his death he sued her for $100m. In the film, he’s depicted as treating her more like a financial asset than a human being. “I had a personal experience with John that shook me up,” Lemmons said. “He was the one who spoke to me about ‘the brand’. That was very chilling. That was his daughter that he was talking about!”.
Before coming to a review that is positive but also hints at some possible issues, Movie Guide provided their review of, in my view, the best and most powerful music biopic of 2022:
“WHITNEY HOUSTON: I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY is a biopic of the late pop singer Whitney Houston and focuses on her triumphs, trials and tribulations, all of which sadly, in one way or another, led to her tragic death due to a quote “accidental drug overdose” unquote, but the movie also has some positive references to Whitney’s Christian background and ongoing faith. I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY has a dynamic, superlative performance by Naomi Ackie as Whitney, and another excellent performance by Stanley Tucci as music producer Clive Davis, but it whitewashes some aspects of Whitney’s behavior and has lots of strong foul language, some mostly implied references to Whitney’s drug abuse and depictions of Whitney’s brief lesbian relationship with her best friend, an immoral relationship that Whitney rejected more strongly than the movie suggests.
The movie follows Whitney as she sings in church and nightclubs under her mother, Cissy’s, tutelage. Cissy is a professional singer in her own right, but she never achieved the heights of stardom her daughter did. A senior in high school, Whitney is on the verge of becoming a professional singer. However, although she and her family go to church, Whitney has been having a lesbian relationship with her best friend, Robyn Crawford, who’s started college. The two are shown kissing and smoking a marijuana bong in one short sequence.
Whitney’s budding singing career attracts the attention of Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records. Davis is impressed with her singing, and he offers Whitney a record contract in April 1983, four months before her 20th birthday. However, as she begins working with Davis, Whitney beaks off her relationship with Robyn. She tells Robyn she’s worried about going to Hell because of their illicit relationship. The movie implies there’s also been some pressure from her mother to break off the relationship, though the two young women remain friends.
Whitney’s first album in 1985 becomes a huge hit, generating three Number One hits. She hires her friend Robyn as her personal assistant and her father as her manager. Behind the scenes, as her record career continues to soar, Whitney tells Robyn she wants to marry a man and have a family. After dating several celebrities, including Eddie Murphy, she begins seeing popular singer Bobby Brown in 1989. They get married three years later, a year after Whitney gives a stunning performance of the national anthem at the Superbowl.
Whitney decides to start making movies, and her 1992 debut, THE BODYGURD with Kevin Costner, becomes a huge hit. It also generates a Number One hit album and a Number One hit single for Whitney, a cover song of Dolly Parton’s 1974 hit, “I Will Always Love You.” The album won the 1994 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Meanwhile, in 1993, Whitney and Bobby have a baby daughter, Bobbi Christina.
In the late 1990s, Whitney and her husband begin having more serious problems. One scene shows a battered Whitney, who’s been beaten by her husband. Their alcohol and drug use and tumultuous marriage receive widespread media coverage. She starts to miss scheduled performances and in the early 2000s learned that her father had been mishandling her money.
The rest of the movie shows Whitney trying to recover from her abuse of alcohol, cocaine and pills. Despite a six-year recording lull, she releases her final album in 2009. The album reaches Number One, her first since the BODYGUARD album, but Whitney’s drug and alcohol abuse has taken a toll on her beautiful singing voice.
WHITNEY HOUSTON: I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY tells a story of triumph and tragedy. Naomi Ackie delivers a dynamic, superlative performance as Whitney. The movie uses Whitney’s voice during the musical numbers, but the viewer can see that, in the musical numbers, Ackie is fully invested in singing the songs like Whitney sang them. Another excellent performance is by Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Whitney’s long-time record producer and friend”.
Most of the reviews for Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody have been positive. I think it sets out to be more positive and less controversy-focused than other films before. The Guardian argue that the decision not to look at Houston’s drug use and sexuality is a negative. Despite that, Peter Bradshaw was moved and impressed by Naomi Akcie’s remarkable and strong lead performance:
“The movie skates over the still fraught subject of who was supplying Houston with drugs and who therefore effectively enabled her sad death, and it simply does not mention that Houston’s grownup daughter herself died just three years later in a grimly similar way. Documentaries have tiptoed around the allegations that family members had to source drugs on tour; this film conveniently invents a shifty-looking white guy who asks Houston for her autograph and then cash and drugs are surreptitiously exchanged under cover of Houston getting pen and paper from her bag. Nor does this film mention the theory from Macdonald’s documentary that Houston was sexually abused as a child by a cousin.
It does however deliver the big scenes and big moments, especially her amazing performance of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. But a boilerplate music biopic like this usually runs in four stages: tough beginnings, success, crisis and redemptive comeback. Whitney’s life can’t give us the last of these and this film averts its gaze from the grim final reality of that hotel room in 2012, preferring to circle back in flashback to the triumph of Whitney’s performance at the 1994 American Music Awards, in which she sang her famous medley of I Loves You Porgy, And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going and I Have Nothing.
The ultimate questions are not really answered: was Whitney a gay woman whose problems stemmed from being imprisoned in the closet? Was she a gospel/R&B genius whose agonies arose from being a pop princess for white audiences? Or was it simply that she had to use drugs to relieve the stress of a touring schedule she was forced into by her big-spending family retinue? It could be any of these, and the film touches gingerly on each possibility. But it’s a muscular, heartfelt performance from Ackie”.
I think we will see some interesting music biopics next year (including the Madonna biopic). It is hard to balance an artist’s true life and darker moments with their highs and true brilliance. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody does not swerve some of the more difficult and complex aspects of Whitney Houston, but it is more to do with her brilliance as an artist. Whilst not flattering Houston, it does correct and address the sensationalist view of her. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody does the late legend producer. Naomi Ackie is remarkable in the lead role, whilst Stanley Tucci is brilliant as Clive Davis. The film is a treat for Whitney Houston fans, but I know that it will also alert new listeners to her amazing music…
AND timeless legacy.