Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

I feel like I've watched this movie many times, and indeed I have.  Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is yet another musical biofilm that takes the fascinating and troubled life of a celebrity, and molds it into a safe and sanitary Hollywood feature that's been toned down to achieve a PG-13 rating.  Just last year, Aretha Franklin got the treatment with the underwhelming film, Respect.  Now it's Houston's turn, and the end result is as generic and uninspiring as Franklin's film.

Sometimes musical biofilms can be thrilling and match the imagination and artistry of the singer they're supposed to be celebrating, such as Elvis from this past summer, or Elton John's Rocketman from a few years ago.  But all too often, these movies take a "filmed Wikipedia" approach, sprinkling a few facts about the singer's life between recreations of some of their more famous performances or music videos.  Given that the film was written by Anthony McCarten, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that this movie takes that traditional and tired approach.  After all, he's the guy who brought us Bohemian Rhapsody, which turned the life of Freddie Mercury into such a bore.  Just like that one, this movie takes snippets of Whitney's life, but never gives us a connecting strand to string these moments together to create a compelling narrative.  

British actress Naomi Ackie takes on the role of Houston here, and while she has the moves and mannerisms of the famed singer, and she lip syncs to the original music well, it often comes across as an imitation rather than a genuine performance.  She's not entirely at fault, as I think that's what director Kasi Lemmons (2019's Harriet) was going for.  The movie doesn't want to truly probe the life of its subject matter, or dig into the troubled personal life she led.  Oh, sure, we get snippets of it, but I think that the main goal of the film was to not offend anyone who might have known her, and gloss over as much as possible her addictions to drugs which led to her tragic passing in 2012, or her problematic marriage to Bobby Brown (played here by Ashton Sanders).  So, the obvious question becomes if you're going to make a softball movie that doesn't actually dig into the story of what happened, what's the point of the film itself?

If it's to simply celebrate Whitney Houston's career, there's lots of ways to do it without pretending to be a hard-hitting docudrama that you don't want to be in the first place.  Most of the people in Houston's life who appear in the film are genuinely scrubbed clean here.  Her record producer Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci) is more or less a big softie who only wants the best for her.  Her best friend and former girlfriend, Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), is not given as much attention as she should, especially the romantic relationship she shared with Whitney early in her life.  Only Whitney's father, John (Clarke Peters), gets to be portrayed as the heavy in this movie.  Good thing John Houston is gone in real life, so he can't complain about how he's been depicted here.  Everybody has been molded into a role that fits the predetermined "rise and fall" narrative of the film.

The movie actually manages to get worse as it goes on, as the last half becomes a depressing depiction of Whitney losing the battle to her various personal demons.  It'd be one thing if the film was actually digging into the subject matter and allowing us to feel something, but like the material covering the rest of her life and career, it treats this subject matter with a kind of passive indifference.  Rather than being emotional and tragic, it comes across as kind of exploitative and ghoulish.  The movie hasn't earned the kind of emotions it wants to inspire in its final moments, and not even trying to get inside the singer's mind in her final moments, having her tearfully sing at her reflection in the mirror, is enough to lift this material.  

Fans who want to celebrate Whitney Houston can do so much better than I Wanna Dance with Somebody.  It's yet another film that lacks the basic understanding of what made the singer so complex.  By focusing solely on her biggest hits and flashes of her life that have been poorly edited with characters simply entering and exiting the story at random, the movie winds up doing a great disservice.

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