Review — Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
The latest Hollywood music biopic is mediocre… but that is a step-up from the usual.
For hopefully obvious reasons, I did have some reservations about this film. The slew of recent biopics attempting, or claiming, to capture the lives of iconic 80s musicians is frankly tiring and more than worn out, but the easily written scripts and the built-in advertising bonus of focusing on a beloved celebrity mean that Hollywood will continue to make these films until they fail to produce healthy profits. At least this time they had an auteur director at the helm — Kasi Lemmons, director of the great Eve’s Bayou and the decent Harriet in 2019, the latter being a biopic of Harriet Tubman this time.
So, how does Lemmons’ film on Houston function? Thankfully, the direction is generally solid… it is the script which lets this film down more than anything as it fails to capture any kind of complexity. Houston was a complex figure — she speaks in this film about trying to transcend racial boundaries and simply ‘be herself’, she merges her childhood gospel influence with modern pop celebrity living and most importantly to her private life was her troubled relationships with her mother, father and musician Bobby Brown. These relationships were crucial to Houston’s life and, by extension, her celebrity but in I Wanna Dance With Somebody, these…
