I Wanna Dance With Somebody

I Wanna Dance With Somebody

Starring Naomi Ackie, Stanley Tucci, Ashton Sanders, Tamara Tunie

Directed by Kasi Lemmons

For me, my least favorite subgenre of film is the musical biopic, because they all promise the same thing yet more often than not fail to deliver on that promise: they almost always announce the film as "the (insert artist here) you never knew." With such a weighted statement you'd expect to go into a film like "All Eyez On Me" or "Respect" and find out something new about those artists that we've grown up with, but instead all it does is give us a Wikipedia-style fact-based greatest hits of their life which usually just involves them finding the music that shaped them. "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is no different, where it offered "the Whitney you never knew" and instead gave us "the Whitney we could've read on Wikipedia with her music playing in the background."

Growing up with famous gospel singer Cissy Houston (Tamra Tunie) and her overbearing father John (Clarke Peters) in New Jersey, Whitney Houston (Naomi Ackie) sang in the church choir that her mother led, and she had an undeniably fantastic voice. One day she meets Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams) and they begin a secret relationship, and one night at a bar Cissy sees record producer Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci) and fakes losing her voice so she can showcase Whitney to him. Clive immediately claims she's the voice for the generation and signs her to his record label, and she begins her career in music, setting herself apart by not focusing on "black" or "white" songs, but songs that deliver a message. As the years went on her fame rose, she broke it off with Robyn but made her her assistant and her father her manager, and discovers her father has been using her for her money. Then she meets Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders) and they begin their tumultuous love affair resulting in her decent into drugs and alcohol before she eventually succumbs to her demons in a hotel bathtub in 2012.

If it sounds like the summary of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is formulaic and sterile, that's how the entire film was. Hopping from year to year focusing on the different songs Whitney finds and sings is the essence of the film, with very little centering on her private life. The beginning of the film was the most personal as she sings in her mom's choir and endures her mother's overbearing yet nurturing nature, and her relationship with Robyn was a pleasant surprise, but once Clive Davis enters the picture it's a fast forward fling through the years as she does music videos, concerts, movies, and meets Bobby Brown. It seems that director Kasi Lemmons is glossing over most of Whitney's early years to get to the real meat and potatoes of her story - her spiral downward that led to her untimely death - but that never happens. Instead it just glosses over every aspect of her life without really delivering anything important of note.

There were some topics that could've been addressed in a deeper way instead of an areal viewpoint that could've made this a thought-provoking, powerful film, but instead it relegated itself to the tropes of musical biopics and focused solely on song choices and concerts. There was an interesting scene where Whitney was pressed about her music not being "black" enough, and her response was something powerful: she doesn't sing "black" or "white," but she just sings. She didn't attribute anything to a song other than its meaning, but besides that one confrontation it's never mentioned again. Then there's her secret bisexuality that was the main focus of the beginning of the film but then also never mentioned again. One day she meets Bobby Brown at a show and literally the next scene they're deep into their relationship without us knowing how it happened. We never see her as a manager of her money except one confrontation with her father who's been siphoning her funds for his own needs (and in a possibly unintentionally humorous editing moment, while in the hospital he threatens to sue her for the money she owes him, and the next scene is his funeral). We don't know how she was as a mother to young Bobbi Kristina who also tragically passed away in 2015 apart from small fleeting moments. Nothing sets the film apart and nothing really happens that makes you remember it.

It's not the fault of the actors who were given such a lackluster script, and the performers all did what they could with what they got, especially newcomer Naomi Ackie who tackled playing the great Whitney Houston. Although people criticized her for not looking the part, it's almost impossible to exactly replicate another person's appearance, and the fact that she didn't sing the songs in the movie was another point of contention, but no one could sing Whitney like Whitney could, and if she did it wouldn't fared worse than it did.

"I Wanna Dance With Somebody" should've been a stellar biopic about one of music's most tragic figures, but it relegated itself to a beat-by-beat moment of song choices and performances that passed over any substantial private moments of the singer's life. To get a better grasp on what it was to be Whitney, you should check out the Grammy-nominated documentary "Whitney" instead.

The Score: C