by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Whitney, a much-hyped biopic of Whitney Houston … well,
not the whole life of Whitney Houston,
which would have been considerably more interesting. A story that told her
transition from good little church-singing daughter of soul courtier Cissy
Houston, a classic “40 Feet from Stardom” singer whose group, the Sweet
Inspirations, sang backup for Aretha Franklin and later, after he offered them
way more money, for Elvis Presley, to pop-soul diva to spoiled star to her mysterious death on
February 11, 2012 on the eve of the Grammy Awards (where she was supposed to be
featured in a big tribute as part of her comeback attempt) would have been
considerably more interesting than the film we got from writer Shem Bitterman
and director Angela Bassett — yes, the same person who made a splash playing
another troubled soul diva, Tina Turner, in What’s Love Got to Do with It (a much better movie than this one!). They decided
to focus their film entirely on the relationship between Houston (Yaya DaCosta)
and her husband, soul/R&B singer Bobby Brown (Arlen Escarpeta), picking up
Houston’s story as she’s sweeping the Soul Train awards and she meets Brown because the two of them
are both performing at the event. The film was apparently produced with Brown’s
full cooperation and definitely was opposed by Houston’s family — mom Cissy
bitched to Entertainment Tonight that no one involved in the making of the film had actually known
Whitney Houston and the daughter she had with Brown, Bobbi Kristina Brown, was
upset that she was not picked to play her mom in it. Angela Bassett said that
was because “she’s not an actress. I know she’s acted here and there. I know
she’s been on their family’s reality show, but she’s not an actress and acting
is a craft.” (That seems an odd criticism considering how wretchedly Whitney
Houston herself acted in the film The Bodyguard; her stunning cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will
Always Love You” made both the film itself and its soundtrack album mega-hits,
but her performance was so bad Charles rather nastily cracked that she wasn’t
even able to play herself — though in her defense, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan
created such a wildly inconsistent character that even someone with far more
acting experience — like Barbra Streisand, for whom Kasdan originally wrote it
— would have been thrown.) What makes me suspect that Bobby Brown was
Bitterman’s and Bassett’s principal source of information is not only that
Lifetime immediately followed up the film with an hour-long interview with him
reminiscing about their relationship and dredging up its more sordid,
tabloid-friendly aspects (the drinking, the drugs, the infidelities) but the
script seemed designed deliberately to counter the standard “legend” of
Houston’s career.
The “legend” is that she was a talented and professionally
responsible, straight-edge singer until she met Brown, who got her hooked on
drugs and a party-hearty lifestyle and basically dragged her down with him, and
though she ultimately divorced him in 2007 (five years before she died) it was
too late. The version presented in this film not only shows her using cocaine
before he ever did but him trying to talk her out of it, and her status as a drug-user
becoming public when he went into rehab and someone in his group violated the
anonymity principle big-time and sold his revelations to a tabloid. There are
some parts of this movie that ring true — like when Cissy Houston (Suzzanne
Douglas) lectures Whitney when she’s about to marry Brown and makes it clear
she’s against it because the Houstons were from the Black middle class and the
Browns were from the ghetto, and “you can take the man out of the projects but
you can’t take the projects out of the man” — but for the most part it’s a
pretty standard-issue movie biography, leaning heavily for inspiration on The
Jolson Story, Funny Girl and
quite a few other movies I can’t think of at the moment simply because their
clichés have become so much a
part of the culture that it’s hard to trace them back to their origins. Indeed,
the ending is a stone ripoff of Funny Girl (appropriate enough given that Houston’s big breakthrough film was
originally planned as a Streisand vehicle): Whitney Houston has finally broken
up with the man with whom she’s had a troubled and acutely dysfunctional
relationship when she has to go out and deliver a performance of “I Will Always
Love You,” and the song becomes a summing-up of her heartbreak the way “The
Music That Makes Me Dance” did in the stage version of Funny Girl and “My Man” did in the film. I remember Whitney
Houston as someone whose first flush of popularity coincided with my coming-out
as a Gay man, and every time one of her records was played in a Gay bar I felt
a sense of relief that the loud, obnoxious pounding “dance music” that
dominated such places (and mostly still does!) would part for at least a few
minutes and I’d get to hear a glorious pop-soul voice caressing songs with
actual melodies. Whitney Houston was one
of the most perfect voices ever to record (on a par with Karen Carpenter’s — another tragic,
ill-fated figure — for sheer beauty and purity), and whatever I thought of her
music (she was the sort of singer who was great when they gave her the right
song; alas, especially after the first two albums, that didn’t happen all that
often), I always loved the sheer sonority of the voice itself.
Oddly, the
vocals on this movie sound only superficially like the real one; I’m not sure
who did the singing since the imdb.com page on this film does not yet have a
“Soundtracks” section, and I had assumed it was Yaya DaCosta herself but one
imdb.com message board contributor said she had a voice double named Deborah
Cox, but whoever was singing didn’t have the sheer purity of Houston’s own
voice but made up for it by singing far more soulfully, indulging in a lot more
melismas, “worrying” and the other devices of soul music (and the Black gospel
from which it derived), to the point where the vocals on this movie turned out
to be interesting in themselves as reworkings of Houston’s style with less
sheer beauty but more emotion and passion. Unfortunately, when the Houston
character wasn’t singing this film was so
overwrought as to be virtually unwatchable — DaCosta and Escarpeta did such
convincing beaver imitations on the scenery it’s hard to imagine anything was
left of it when the film wrapped, and Bassett seemed intent on going out of her
way to disprove my theory that actor-directors (from Stroheim and Welles — even
though as actors they were unmitigated hams — to Allen, Redford, Costner and
Eastwood) generally get marvelously quiet, understated performances from their
casts. Even the soft-core porn scenes — of which there were several, featuring
sex-machine Brown not only with Houston but the two other women with whom he
had kids (one of whom he dated and knocked up a second time while he and
Houston had already begun their relationship), as well as the party-girl he
gets introduced to by one of his “projects” friends and takes up to Houston’s
palatial home, only to have Houston unexpectedly come home early and catch them
in flagrante delicto (not that old cliché again — that one’s so hoary there’s
probably a painting of it at Lascaux!) — aren’t especially exciting or interesting. Whitney Houston’s story, though one
with all too many of the makings of cliché (enormously talented star wastes it
and ends up ruined and dead way too early), could have made an excellent (or at least a very good)
film; instead this one is just a mess, and between this and the savage reviews
Lifetime got for their biopic of Aaliyah (which I haven’t seen, though I
undoubtedly have it in the backlog somewhere), maybe they just ought to lay off
and not do any more movies based on classic and prematurely deceased Black divas, even if they think this is the best sort of
programming they can offer for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend!
