‘Beauty’ — Overcoming, Just to Become Someone Else
A review and analysis of a dramalacking depth, about a singer we never hear
Beauty is loosely based on Whitney Houston’s private life. It’s about a singer, the titular Beauty, who is torn between family, career, and her love life.
This film tried to be impactful but fell flat on its face, much to my disappointment. And that’s not just my opinion, judging by the looks of various other reviews and its quite low IMDb rating — which unfortunately I hadn’t seen before jumping into this film.
But it did find that handful of relatability in terms of showing the toxicity and abuse within many of the relationships between characters.
But relatability alone, cannot make a film great.
A Toxic Family
Beauty’s family is straight-up abusive and manipulative, save for her brother, Abel. Beauty’s mother is overprotective and unaccepting. She wants Beauty to be happy but is also envious of Beauty’s singing and her making it into the music industry.
The father is horrible. No redemption. He is emotionally manipulative and mentally abusive. There’s a scene where he degrades his own son, Abel, for being simple and that his son would grow up to be unloved by his own family one day.
The man also completely ignores his other son, Cain, who we later find out is not his actual son but his wife’s.
Beauty’s father is more favorable to her though, only because he sees her as a cash cow. She has a beautiful singing voice (which we don’t get to hear, ever, but more on that later), and she is being offered a contract by a big record label.
He coerces and emotionally blackmails her into signing the deal so he can later roll around in her money.
Abel and Cain — the brothers — loathe each other, and their names are too on the nose as religious references. Oh look, their family is also religious. But religion is abandoned when Beauty is slapped across the face by her mother, or pushed up against a refrigerator by her father when she tries to stand up for herself.
The only person that actually cares about our protagonist is her girlfriend, Jasmine. Yes, girlfriend, not a friend who is a girl, but a love interest. Beauty’s interest in women is the entire reason why Beauty’s mother is unaccepting most of the time.
Artistic but Ambiguous
The film relies too much on non-verbal cues and cinematography. As a person who loves to interpret and analyze scenes, I loved it. But when you try to make many scenes speak for themselves, you end up silencing most of the film.
The incredible acting is under-utilized by the need to let the viewers guess about what happened away from camera.
One of the scenes which frustrated me most is when Jasmine is led to the back of the bar she’s in. We only get to hear a train passing by and the camera is stuck looking at the place she walked away from. We hear nothing of value, we see nothing of value. But we are led to ask the question: what happened?
Oh, nothing much. She was probably beat up by the bartender because Beauty’s father possibly paid him to do so. Why? Because Jasmine cares more about Beauty than him.
That’s my answer. You could have a different one, a darker one if you wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. Because Jasmine is shown in the hospital in the next scenes, so we can piece things together ourselves.
I believe, instead of letting the viewers interpret scenes, it would’ve been better to build up stronger characters. Bring depth to their existence in the film instead of relaying almost everything about them within a couple of scenes.
Half-Baked Characters
In the entire film, Jasmine is the only character who had even some depth to her person. She genuinely worries for Beauty and wants her to be happy with whatever she is doing. She is also the only person who unconditionally supports our protagonist and stays loyal to her until the very end of the film. But even then her existence is tied to Beauty’s and we see nothing more of her as an individual.
Beauty’s father — deep sigh — is just rotten to the core. He asks Beauty for “his cut” even on his deathbed, which is just an incredibly low move.
Abel is a good brother who doesn’t judge Beauty and Jasmine’s relationship, but he completely disappears from the film in the second half.
Cain is Beauty’s half-brother and seems to have issues with almost everyone. He doesn’t like Jasmine and is willing to make his father happy by agreeing to go beat her up; he later has a brawl with Abel; and he doesn’t have any significant scenes with Beauty.
He is just there to make the dad look like a horrible person.
Beauty’s mother barely matters in the film. From what I gathered, she was a failed singer and has sung backup most of her life. And she is jealous of her own daughter for being signed into a record label instead of her.
You see how these characters have so little to contribute to the story, since we don’t see much of them after Beauty signs the contract with the record label.
These characters are barely able to provide any relatability to the viewers but even then, at what cost?
Part of the Problem
We see Beauty going from a teenager who watches iconic black singers on TV, to becoming an adult who watches iconic black singers on her TV. But wait, this time she’s in a brand new apartment and out of her parents’ house.
Beauty doesn’t just move places, she also becomes someone she wasn’t supposed to.
Her manager (or whoever that blonde woman was) is changing her to appeal to a white audience which Beauty doesn’t want to do. But she is being built up to be an icon for both white little girls and black little girls. Hey, I’m just using words her manager used.
Beauty is not allowed to show affection to her girlfriend, Jasmine, or to speak about her if ever she’s asked about any lovers.
Her manager also makes her try on long-haired wigs, and tells her to watch past musicians that her record label has produced. Spoiler: all white artists.
But while Beauty is, by now, pandering to whatever her blonde manager wants — she is becoming someone else.
The biggest change to her though is in how she treats the only person who has been there to support her for absolutely no gain.
Beauty flirts with her next door neighbor behind Jasmine’s back, and then invites him to watch her debut on a show. She then proceeds to flirt with said neighbor in front of Jasmine. But by then, she has become what everyone was trying to mold her into. A normal woman packaged into an iconic singer.
“This is my last chance to be normal.”
“You’re not normal.”
“I know that, but the world don’t know that yet.”
Overcoming What Exactly
My thoughts on the film are so clear — I’ve tried to make them as apparent in this piece as I could.
I didn’t like the film.
Even with all of its artistic prowess and incredible acting, nothing could save it from its ambiguous direction and lackluster story.
Beauty is a strong character but she is sidelined by the fact that whenever she’s standing in the booth to sing, all we hear is everything other than her voice. She sings nothing.
All we know about her amazing singing voice is through other characters, and quite frankly, I don’t trust them.
But the film fails not only because of the lack of a singer, but because Beauty is not overcoming anything. She has an abusive and toxic family, yes. But as much as we know now, everybody is toxic towards Beauty. Even if she overcomes her family situations, she is thrusted into a world where she is being used for her likeness to capture fans from both white and black populations.
It’s a hopeless situation where she escapes her small world, only to go into the real world where things are far worse. She can’t be her own person. She can’t love the one she loves. But she can still sing, right?
Well, she can’t in the film. Or more like, we can’t hear her.
But maybe we weren’t meant to hear her sing from the very beginning.
This was a commentary piece on the 2022 drama/romance film ‘Beauty’. If you enjoyed reading this, feel free to browse through more of my work on Medium. Thank you for reading!
