144 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | TriStar Pictures
Whitney Houston has the voice of the century. Clive Davis turns it into a machine and the people around her fight over the parts. The film loves her too much to tell the whole truth.
Whitney Houston enters as a teenager singing backup for her mother in New Jersey clubs. Clive Davis hears the voice and builds an empire around it. The film tracks her climb from gospel-trained unknown to the biggest pop star on the planet, and the addiction and marriage that pull her apart. Kasi Lemmons frames the story around the gap between the voice America wants and the woman who owns it. This is really a film about the cost of being managed into a product.
Naomi Ackie plays Houston with physical conviction. She does not sing. The film uses Houston’s master recordings and Ackie lip-syncs to them, so she sells the performance through posture, breath, and the way she commands a crowd. Stanley Tucci plays Clive Davis as a patient broker who treats talent as inventory. Ashton Sanders plays Bobby Brown with a wounded ego that curdles into resentment. Nafessa Williams plays Robyn Crawford as the one person who loves Houston without wanting a piece of her, and the film keeps pushing her to the margins the way Houston’s handlers do.
Kasi Lemmons directs from a script by Anthony McCarten, who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody. The film inherits the same problem. It moves through two decades in episodic chapters, and the editing jumps between milestones without letting any of them breathe. The concert recreations are the strongest material, and the staging of the 1994 American Music Awards medley shows what the film can do when it stops narrating and starts performing. The rest leans on the catalog of hits to supply emotion the screenplay never earns.
The film respects Houston and refuses to reduce her to her death. That restraint is admirable and also a limitation. By smoothing the rough edges it turns a complicated life into a greatest-hits reel with interludes of pain. Ackie deserves a sharper movie around her. This one hands her the voice and the spectacle but not the structure to make either land.