Whitney Houston’s sister-in-law, Pat Houston, has already condemned the film, which was done without the cooperation of Houston’s family and which uses Deborah Cox to dub Houston’s voice she and others close to Houston were alarmed by reports that the movie contains frank sex and explicit drug use and generally doesn’t shy away from showing how the singer’s addiction led her to degrade herself and make poor choices.
She knows this is basically a melodrama, so she places the tumultuous relationship between lovers-turned-spouses Whitney Houston (Yaya DaCosta) and Bobby Brown (Arlen Escarpeta), two high-strung, egotistical, driven, and addiction-prone people, front and center but she also approaches every scene with a great deal of precision and a fair amount of emotional distance, never judging anyone or taking sides, always scrutinizing Whitney and Bobby as if through transparent walls.
As an artist, she doesn’t lean on TV movie formulas. Why, then, is this relatively short movie so strangely powerful?Ī lot of it comes from the way actress Angela Bassett, making her directorial debut, approaches the material. And there’s nothing onscreen that can’t be learned or understood from reading a book or magazine article about Houston. You’ve seen the rise-and-fall-and-partial-redemption narrative done in Lifetime style: the fights, the tears, the reconciliation. Shem Bitterman’s script is filled with expository clunkers (“What about that Whitney, huh? Who’d’ve thought she’d become a movie star?”).
That description pretty much loads the viewer up with preconceived notions, and it would be silly to pretend that this TV movie entirely neutralizes them. However, the absolute scene-stealer in this trailer: Mark Rolston as Houston’s music biz mentor, Clive Davis.Whitney is a Whitney Houston biopic airing tonight on Lifetime. Whitney marks the directorial debut of Angela Bassett, an actress who knows something about the tumultuous personal lives of pop singers away from the mike, having sublimely portrayed Tina Turner in 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With it. Yaya DaCosta, a runner-up on CW’s America’s Top Model landed the role of Houston, with Arlen Escarpeta is playing Houston’s wild better half, Bobby Brown. For some, she has just as much resonance as Michael Jackson, so it will be interesting to see if Whitney outstrips Aaliyah in the ratings. That was a solid number, but while Aaliyah was in the zeitgeist at the start of the millennium, Houston, on the other hand, is one of the world’s best selling performers with over 200M albums sold worldwide and slew of diamond, multi-platinum certifications. The TV film follows on the heels of the femme network’s previous music biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, which drew 3.2M viewers. On January 17, Lifetime is hoping that you wanna watch Whitneywith somebody - somebody who loves you ( Hello, that’s a play on the lyrics of Whitney Houston’s hit single “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” for all those who haven’t committed her songs to memory).