Ackie puts in a magnificent performance throughout I Wanna Dace With Somebody. She makes Whitney feisty with a big F. The actor fully gives us the anger and the pain that was the price paid for the artist’s spine of iron. Her acting is triumph and tragedy, simultaneously firing across all pistons. While there is wonderful supporting work here, this is Ackie’s show, and she earns it.
Williams and Tucci, as her support system, provide the perfect counterbalance to Tunie and Peters’ excellent work as her dysfunctional parents. The musical performances space the full songs out across the movie, winning major points, and keeping the drama from being upstaged. Ackie shines in the song sequences too. Houston fans will not be disappointed.
“Ackie puts in a magnificent performance…”
As this is an authorized biopic with Clive Davis and Pat Houston producing, I expected I Wanna Dance With Somebody to present Houston in a positive light. As the producers wish to preserve and enshrine Houston’s legacy, the focus here is on Houston’s talent and achievements instead of the more sordid matters. I commend it for being brave enough to present her Lesbianism and how destructive it was to have her hide it. However, the depiction of her drug addiction is so fleeting that it does the film a disservice. There are less than a handful of scenes of her using, and they are as brief as brief can be.
I get that Lemmons and company didn’t want to resurrect the tabloid “Hey Bob-Beeee!” image of Houston during her most visible downward spiral. However, by sweeping the gory details of her habit under the rug, the film underplays how hard drugs destroy talent and the lives of loved ones. The film even reinforces Houston’s infamous “crack is whack” denial by portraying her as smoking a sprinkle of powder cocaine out of a spoon while using a full-blown glass stem. To try to claim it is more elegant to smoke cocaine as a powder instead of rock form is bullshit. Freebase is freebase.
Leaving crack out of Whitney Houston’s biopic is like making the Orson Welles story without ever showing him overweight. I wanted to see Ackie bug-eyed, lips foaming and picking paint chips out of the rug, just to enforce that hard drugs can destroy anyone, no matter how talented. By reducing the impact of addiction to wearing sunglasses indoors and singing badly for Scandinavians, all cautionary benefits of Houston’s tragedy are lost in the stage lights. Still, I Wanna Dance With Somebody is a worthy effort with just a coat too much whitewash.
"…the producers wish to preserve and enshrine Houston's legacy..."
