At some point it was just called

the

voice: Whitney Houston, the chorus girl from New Jersey who became a superstar in the eighties with happy pop hits and couldn't deal with the fame in the long run.

Her life drama was disturbingly portrayed in some Netflix documentaries such as Can I Be Me, while the estate executors took legal action.

As an alternative to this, a film can now be seen in cinemas, which - with the blessing of the Trust - celebrates the singer for two and a half hours.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

The biopic, directed by Kasi Lemmons, brings together all the Whitney moments on her way from sweatshirt to catsuit: how she raised her fabulous voice on television for the first time in 1983, how she beamed and danced the video “How Will I Know ’, which was then played in an endless loop on MTV, or belted out the American anthem at the Superbowl in a white jogging suit with a headband.

Tragedies in fast forward

That January 27, 1991 moment in Tampa made history not only because of her rendition, slowly singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" while America had gone to war with Iraq ten days earlier, but also because that performance was a It was fake, as it became known afterwards.

At the time, the twenty-seven-year-old had moved her mother to tears, like millions of Americans on the screens, with a studio recording – the microphones in the stadium were muted.

The fact that the film "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" withholds this detail from the viewers in order to have the actress Naomi Ackie, who does not sing the songs in the film, lip-synch imitate Whitney Houston without revealing that she herself only imitated singing, is the revealing scene of this film biography: It tries so hard to authentically reconstruct that it cannot find its own story to tell about its central character.

Sure, the private and artistic tragedies occur, fast-forwarding like ticking off the Wikipedia entry, from the early, dead-end lesbian relationship with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), to the strained relationship with her father (Clarke Peters) , who embezzled Houston's earnings, until her dysfunctional relationship with crack addict Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders).

The film doesn't ignite the accusations that Whitney Houston doesn't sing black enough or that she doesn't write her own songs.

Some scenes are touching.

When the legendary head of Arista Records, Clive Davis, discovers the twenty-year-old in a New York nightclub after her mother Cissy (Tamara Tunie), herself a well-known gospel singer, leaves the stage to her daughter with a fake cough.

And it's not a problem that Naomi Ackie doesn't look like Whitney Houston at all, because she captures her essence and impresses with her mimicry, jaw trembling as she sings, head thrown back and arms spread as if to create space for a voice spanning three octaves.

But Houston's unpredictable ego, her anger, her hunger for recognition, the double can only hint at, as if they wanted to protect the icon from her actress.

Monument to the manager

The Oscar-winning screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who wants to tell the story of forty-eight years of life in two and a half hours, soon lets go of the threads that are supposed to spin the character of an artist, an unstable addict, a loving mother and those exploited by her environment.

Even the relationship with Robyn Crawford, which he says was the theme of the title song, which is about wanting to dance with someone "but just can't," becomes a fringe episode, and Crawford, like the rest of the entourage, is soon only allowed to recite sentences like "You've changed".

In addition to the mother, who is still alive, the music manager Clive Davis, who co-produced the film, is memorialized in Stanley Tucci's paternal play.

In return, the film avoids the question of who actually supplied Houston with all the drugs and does not mention that Houston's daughter died in a bathtub in a very similar way soon after her death.

While documentaries have suggested family members got the star the drugs, criticism has been leveled in America that in the film Houston buys the dope from a white man at the Beverly Hilton on the last day of her life.

Thus, "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" remains an off-the-shelf biopic, and Houston's bitter end to which everything is heading is thrown onto the screen in a lettering, having previously left the sad reality of February 11, 2012, to fully recreate Houston's triumphant performance at the 1994 American Music Awards with their medley of "I Loves You Porgy", "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" and "I Have Nothing".

Who Was Whitney Huston Really?

The question of whether she was a homosexual woman who, under pressure from her family and the studios, couldn't lead the life she wanted to lead is as vaguely suggested as that of whether she was a gospel genius who passed from her label to pop princess was mauled for a white audience, or whether she self-destructively ruined her voice ("Like leaving a Stradivarius out in the rain," her manager barks) in order to be able to complete the tours that a parasitic family forced upon her.

Because the film lacks its origin story, the visualized mixtape leads to an unexpected effect: at some point you get tired of all the songs that play in the cinema in an endless loop, because the film itself soon only seems parasitic.

What did Cissy Houston say to her daughter at the church singing class at the very beginning of the film?

Every song tells a story.

You have to tell the story with your singing, otherwise it's not a song.

A truth that also applies to this film.