At a certain point in “I Wanna Dance with Somebody The Whitney Houston Story” the protagonist is surrounded by a crowd we hardly see and sings one of her anthems at the top of her lungs and, no matter the size of the stadium where she’s performing, she looks like a giant.
The scene is reminiscent of the 1985 Live Aid concert reenacted in Freddie Mercury’s biography Bohemian Rhapsody and Elton John’s 1975 show at Dodgers Stadium, the climax of Rocketman. In recent music biopics, the bigger the better.
It starts with the wordy title of the movie that’s hitting theaters now, but it doesn’t stop there. I Wanna Dance with Somebody tells the story of the American music diva with lots of glamour, glitter, costumes, mansions and unforgettable performances recreated to turn the feature into a great show.
But not only. Whitney Houston’s personal dramas are also pumped into high gear, such as her troubled relationship with her father and exhusband, substance abuse problems, and the suffocating control the industry has tried to exert over her and curtailed her artistic will.
“I watched her rise from an interesting angle because I was pursuing a career in cinema and I had a script for her to read. When I met her and her father, he asked me to write a story exclusively for them and although the film was never made I got to see them up close,” says director Kasi Lemmons, who also directed Harriet. about American abolitionist activist Harriet Tubman.
Lemmons says she was stunned at those 1994 meetings, realizing her father called Whitney a brand and visibly exhausted by all the fame. “He said he wanted her to be like Barbie,” she says.
America’s Doll’s image brought controversy and personal crisis to the voice of “I Will Always Love You” and “How Will I Know”. For example, the film describes how the black movement scolded her for singing superficial, depoliticized pop. And he doesn’t shy away from the fact that this may have been the besthidden part of his career — his relationship with his creative director Robyn Crawford.
Whitney was banned from living the romance publicly at a time when homosexuality was still further from widespread acceptance, and even after her death, several figures associated with her attempted to cover up the case. Recent documentaries involving her family have paid little attention to the diva’s sexuality, which dominates the good times of I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
Lemmons says he would not have directed the film if it hadn’t included that aspect of Whitney’s life. “I was an actress in New York when she got famous and everyone knew about that relationship. When I met her, Robyn was dating. So it was important to tell this story because it hurt her a lot.”
In the opening minutes of I Wanna Dance with Somebody, well before smashing fame, the protagonist gives Robyn a nice kiss on the mouth, in a scene that may surprise unsuspecting fans.
Starting from the time before she entered the music industry, when she was still on stage in the shadow of her mother, who is also a singer Cissy Houston, the storyline runs through the life of the biographer up to her early death in 2012 when she was found in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub at the age of 48.
Who embodies this whirlwind of emotions on stage is the Brit Naomi Ackie, Bafta winner for the series The End of the F***ing World. Landing the role just before the pandemic, she spent the pandemic immersed in all sorts of books, documentaries and videos about Whitney in an intense preparation process that lasted eight months.
However, imitating a voice as iconic and powerful as hers would be impossible, she admits. Therefore, as in “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the protagonist only moves her mouth, while Whitney’s singing penetrated the viewer’s ear.
“Our plan was that I would sing all the songs on the recordings to get the breathing and the movements she’s doing right, but we would end up playing the original songs really loud and no one would hear me. It was only Whitney. “