I wanna dance with somebody: Whitney Houston for everyone

film review
I wanna dance with somebody: Whitney Houston for everyone

Buckle up: we take a journey through the life of the most successful singer of all time to date – Whitney Houston.

Who Was Whitney Houston? A chorus girl with big dreams, a believer, a superstar with more consecutive #1s than The Beatles, wife of R&B singer Bobby Brown, loving mom, lover, betrayed, drug wreck, resurrected woman who never wanted to give up – until her death in 2012, aged just 48.

Everyone becomes a fan here

The biopic about the great singer with a 3-octave voice takes the audience through all these stages: You laugh at the cheeky, young brat, who knows exactly what he wants and always has a saying ready. You get goosebumps when you hear their big hits (and you remember which song you heard before and where). We learn of Whitney’s first love for a woman, her assistant Robyn Crawford. The relationship didn’t fit the norms of her faith, but this friend exudes so much warmth in every scene and is so unconditionally there for Whitney throughout her life that the singer would have done well not to listen to her god in the case.

The film is like a roller coaster ride – we climb up with Whitney and watch her sink. The exceptional artist is played by an exceptional actress: Naomie Acki. She manages to get everyone on her side. She plays her role confidently and softly, in love and hurt, the character appears carried by the whole world and shortly thereafter in free fall – and every facet seems real. All of this makes the superstar in the cinema look like one of us: a woman who wants to be loved, but despite all the cheering in front of the stage, struggles through her life. Perhaps the most touching is the scene between her and an unknown waiter, who finds the right words in the deep that you sometimes need to get up again.

The men bring their misfortune

Otherwise, Whitney has little luck with the men in her life: she loses money, trust, love and the hope of a good home through them. This weakens her more than the good people around her strengthen her: her closest friend Robyn (Nafessa Williams), her mother (Tamara Tunie), also the record company boss Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), who celebrated all successes with her, but who ultimately valued her health and life-saving rehab over more hits. The problem: Whitney wasn’t quite as talented at making her decisions as she was at making the grades.

In the film by director Kasi Lemmons, based on the screenplay by Anthony McCarten, who also wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody”, each role is so well cast that one never thinks: “Unfortunately, this person is now lowering the level”. This helps to relax a lot while watching and makes the film a good item on the program between Christmas dinner and the end of the holiday season.

To show Whitney Houston the necessary respect, her greatest hits, which can be heard in the cinema in the original, will be played. That makes the film long: 144 minutes, which stretches a bit towards the end. Nevertheless, you leave the cinema satisfied – because of the actors, the many dialogues designed to make you smile and a consistently good staging with many nice details. When we leave the cinema, there is sadness because Whitney Houston didn’t get what she deserved in life.

The film starts on December 22, 2022.

Bridget