Score: 3.5 / 5
Musical biopics are tough. Do you let an actor do their own version of the star's music, or do you have them imitate as best as possible? Do you play the original artist's music and ask the new actor to lip-sync? These are critical decisions to make early in the production process, no doubt mired in legal issues of who has the rights and how much they cost, and as such each musical biopic is wildly different in scope, intention, and effect. Rami Malek, for example, was a great Freddie Mercury, but one wonders how the film would have been different if someone else played him while singing his music. Conversely, when Sissy Spacek played Loretta Lynn and sang all her music, I personally appreciated the performance more. So what the heck are you going to do in a film about someone with such an iconic voice and impossible talent as Whitney Houston?
You hire Naomi Ackie to play her. While it would have been nice to see someone like Cynthia Erivo sing all the hit Whitney songs, it probably wouldn't have felt like an honest biopic; it's just too different a voice and body type. So in almost every musical number, Ackie lip-syncs; she does this extraordinarily well, to the point that I wasn't always sure it's Whitney's voice we hear. But the sound editors pull a lot of surprises out for us, namely in the way her vocals are not the familiar ones from her records. I don't know how they did it, but they either found alternate recordings or mixed them to sound unique, and the effect was a constant element of doubt as to exactly whose voice we really hear. It's dazzling.
Ackie -- relatively unknown to me, apart from her brief role in Star Wars 9 -- here does the work of a newborn star, much like Whitney herself did in those early years. She knows she's a star, and it's time the world sees it. Early in the film, Whitney sings in church and as a backup singer for her professional mother Cissy until one day when a major record producer (Stanley Tucci) arrives in the nightclub. Cissy fakes an illness so Whitney can shine, and as she sings "The Greatest Love of All" we are treated to the sight of a producer immediately recognizing the talent of a goddess. It's a lovely scene, buttressed by the film's depiction of Whitney engaging in an early lesbian relationship with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams). That's the kind of representation and emotional honesty a filmmaker like Kasi Lemmons brings to her films, and it's so refreshing to see.
Unfortunately, as it seems all biopics of music superstars do, things go awry, and it's not too long before the fame and pressures build too high. For multiple reasons, her relationship with Crawford suffers as her hits climb the charts, and soon enough she becomes addicted to drugs. Choosing her image and career over living authentically -- the evils of fame are suggested more than explored in this particular story -- she chooses to romantically engage with Bobby Brown. A lot of the second half of this film feels more motivated by the need to hop and skip through critical moments of Whitney's life rather than let the story organically follow any emotional or spiritual beats. More than once, I wished the film might have dramatized more of her early years, or up through her early fame, rather than try to encompass her whole life. By about the time of her singing the national anthem, I was wondering where exactly the film would climax; the Superbowl would have been a nice ending point (had the earlier scenes been more fleshed out), and many other points would have been satisfying.
Instead the film continues its skipping and jumping to the inevitable end of Whitney's life. It's hard to watch her story through a vibrant and life-affirming lens while knowing her story through the lens of public scrutiny, as we know that her voice and style and personhood were so diminished by what was happening to her. The business part of show business is, of course, where the problems originate. Lemmons and Ackie do their best with an otherwise unfocused and desperate screenplay (by Anthony McCarten who also wrote Bohemian Rhapsody); Barry Ackroyd's (The Hurt Locker, United 93, Bombshell, Detroit, Coriolanus) cinematography was a bit garish in light and color saturation, and often felt bizarrely split between shaky personal images and concert-style wide shots. I would have liked more of a personal take on Whitney's story, more of the woman-behind-the-tabloids perspective with didactic meditations on queer Black female fame in the '80s. Because that's what's so life-affirming and fascinating about the real woman, and we're still left to speculate on most of it.
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