In the 10 years since Whitney Houston lost her life, four films have attempted to tell her story. In quick succession, we got an unauthorized documentary, an approved one, a Lifetime TV pic plus a movie that focused squarely on her relationship with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina. According to Anthony McCarten, who wrote the star’s first big-budget Hollywood biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, these films all have one thing in common. “They obsess over her mistakes,” he told the Guardian. “They were all sensational.”
At the same time, he believes that they accurately reflect the gloomy opinion that many have long had of the star. “When people hear the name ‘Whitney Houston,’ they inevitably say the word ‘tragic,'” McCarten said. “It’s a universal perception. In some ways, this film is a corrective to that.”
Many may approach it with a bit of skepticism. I Wanna Dance with Somebody is the brainchild of Houston’s legacy, which includes her sister-in-law and artist Pat Houston, as well as the company that controls key parts of her music rights, Primary Wave and the man who signed her, and some say, shape her, Clive Davies. Although all have approved of the final product, McCarten strongly disputes the suggestion that this led to his work being watered down or censored. “I told them ‘you’re not going to have copyright on this,'” he said. “I’m not doing this to flatter anyone. The audience can smell a rat if it’s a puff piece.
In fact, the film’s director, Cassie Lemons, said that there are scenes in the film that definitely make the mansion uncomfortable. “One of the things that was most challenging about it was dealing with real people, with real emotions and memories and perspectives,” she said. “They had approved the script, but seeing it as a movie was a different thing.”
Although the final version of the film includes some of the murkier or more controversial details of Houston’s story — in fact, some things are made clearer than before — the filmmakers admit that their main goal was to make the film a celebration. “I wanted to focus on her tremendous accomplishments,” McCarten said.
To that end, much of the film focuses on the creation and performance of her music. At the same time, this music sounds drastically different from the way it sounded in studio recordings, live concerts or televised performances. Everything has been enhanced and amplified to take advantage of the Dolby 5.1 sound system of the modern movie theater. The result thunders right through you. All the vocals come from Houston, but the breath of the actor who plays her, British star Naomi Aki, is cleverly incorporated to make the physicality of the performance palpable. “It has to sound and feel like she’s singing live,” Lemons said. “And Naomi knew every breath of the songs.”
The depth of those breaths and the deftness with which Houston deploys them are two elements McCarten considers key to her brilliance. “Any musician who has ever stood behind her during her performances would often notice that this little figure of hers could magically expand,” he said. “She was breathing with her whole chest. Whales are said to be able to do this when they sink miles under the ocean. They expand their ribs to hold huge amounts of air. The way Whitney was able to hold that ballast of air, combined with the power with which she could sustain the high notes and add vibrato, was magnificent.”
Of course, the intense drama of her music found a mirror in the constant tug-of-war between triumphs and tribulations in her life. One conflicting aspect that is presented with more frankness and concreteness than in any previous account is her relationship with her boyfriend and business partner Robin Crawford, who was not in the film. While earlier works heavily hinted at a lesbian relationship, the new film makes it physically clear. According to Lemons, part of that had to do with details offered in Crawford’s memoir, published in 2019. McCarten said that society’s changing attitudes toward sexuality also played a role. “We live in a much more tolerant time,” he said. In contrast, “being open in the ’80s was very, very difficult,” he said.
The pain of this judgment is heightened in the film by the highly disapproving attitude of the relationship displayed by Whitney’s father as well as her mother, Cissy Huston. Both Lemons and McCarten believe that if Houston had come around in today’s era of non-binary pop stars like Janelle Monae and Demi Lovato, she might have been fully aware of her relationship with Crawford. As for how Huston viewed her own sexuality, Lemons opines that it was “fluid”, while McCartan opts for the description “ambivalent – at least in her younger days”.
The futility of putting 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. Although Davis didn’t talk about such things publicly at the time, he wrote about it in his 2013 memoir. “It was important for Clive to put that in the film,” Lemons said. “He and Whitney had that in common.”
Nafessa Williams and Naomi Aki in I Wanna Dance with Somebody. Photo: Landmark Media/Alamy
One sexual aspect noticeably absent from the film is the claim made in Kevin Macdonald’s 2018 documentary that the singer was abused by a family friend when she was young. Although the estate authorized this film, McCarten said “they were very unhappy” with the outcome. “They feel Kevin overstepped the bounds of the deal they had,” he said. “The allegation at the center was not supported by anything like that [Whitney] had told someone else. For Kevin to create a documentary on him seemed fragile. I would have needed a significant amount of supporting evidence to include this.
The new film is more direct in dealing with issues in Houston’s life related to race. It recreates the infamous scene at the Soul Train Awards where she was booed, and includes a scene during a radio interview at a Black station in which the DJ repeats a common complaint of the day: that her music is “too white.” In McCarten’s script, Huston calls out the inherent racism in this view with truthful clarity. At the same time, such accusations hurt her deeply. “Having people call you ‘Oreo’ is extremely painful,” Lemons said. “I sure hope the conversation is different now.”
The lack of nuance in Houston’s days underscores the pain she felt as she confronted assumptions about race and sexuality. Even worse, she had fights within her own family, most notably with her father, who was her manager. Shortly before his death, he sued her for $100 million. In the film, he is portrayed as treating her more like a financial asset than a human being. “I had a personal experience with John that shook me,” Lemons said. “He was the one who told me about the ‘brand’. That was very chilling. That was his daughter he was talking about!’
McCarten has a different view. He called John Huston “a villain with very little ‘v’.” Even at the end when he was suing Whitney, he had a justification in his mind for it,” he said. “He got this record deal for her and he thought the money was wasted by Whitney and Bobby. He did a lot for his daughter.”
However, the singer never reconciled with her father and did not attend his funeral.
Bobby Brown’s portrayal, while rough at times, removes the blame some people place on him for Houston’s physical decline. In one scene, Whitney tells him directly that she was on drugs before she met him. Like Crawford, Brown did not star in the film.
Despite the film’s many sad moments, it accomplishes its goal of mostly showcasing Huston’s brilliance, aided by the fact that its creators had access to far more of her music than previous filmmakers. The film finds its high points in recreating epochal performances, such as her triumphant rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. “She was the architect of that performance,” McCarten said. “She slowed everything down to give herself room to do her work. And she certainly did.
Another standing ovation moment arrives in a scene depicting the Concert for the New South Africa, which was the first show held in that country since apartheid. “Whitney knew how to make a performance speak to the moment,” Lemons said. McCarten added: “When she sang I Will Always Love You on that show, she extrapolated it from a love story to another person into a love story about freedom.”
It eclipses all that performance from the 1994 American Music Awards, where she combined three terrifying songs to create a suite the filmmakers dubbed “The Impossible Medley.” Includes I Loves You, Porgy (from Porgy and Bess), And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going (from Dreamgirls) and her own hit I Have Nothing. Houston compared their singing together to “climbing Everest without oxygen”. “She’ll be singing at the top of her lungs and you think, ‘this is as good as it gets,'” Lemons said. “And then she goes higher.”
Given the power of such performances, as well as the love Huston was able to experience in her life, McCarten refuses to see her as a tragic figure. “If you look at life as flowers at one end of the scale and a pile of shit at the other, which has more weight?” he said. “Whitney’s life had many, many more flowers.”
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