Whitney-The Lifetime Biopic in Short Essays

I particularly don’t like when people do biopics on someone so soon. I like for film makers to wait at least ten years after someone has passed away.

Anyway, Lifetime has been doing many biopics on celebrities more than ever. Three of the most controversy ones were on Saved by the Bell cast, Brittany Murphy, and Alliyah.

I saw clips, saw some of the movies, and I must say that the Saved by the Bell and the Brittany Murphy story weren’t done so well.

However, I wanted to watch Whitney because Angela Bassett directed it. Angela Bassett is an actress I’ve always liked. I get this great sense that she would try to do the film justice and portray Whitney with the type of humanity that an extraordinary person should be portrayed.

On Sunday morning, January 18th, I watched the biopic. Although some critics were negative about the movie and thought it wasn’t that stellar, I am impressed by what Bassett done. She played it smart and clever in how she choose the material in this movie.

Basically, Whitney is about THE grand successful period in her life. It was the time when she met Bobby Brown. The time when she was cast in the Bodyguard. And the time when she married Bobby Brown, and they had their child, Bobbi Kristina.

The movie starts with Whitney arriving to the Soul Train awards. There, she is mesmerized by Bobby Brown’s performance. He asks her out, and she agrees to go out with him.

With follows is a whirlwind romance with a few “private” discoveries in the film. We see, after their first date, Bobby being invited to Whitney’s 26th birthday bash. While she gives him a tour of her house, we first see her doing cocaine. As the movie progresses, her cocaine/drug use becomes worse at the pressures of being a superstar, her marriage on the rocks, and her privacy being invaded take a toll on her.

What the movie does is show us a sensitive human being. A person who had a challenging time handling her superstardom. I mean Whitney Houston was a super-superstar. Her career took off when she was 19…and she got more famous and famous. Even the infamous time in her life…made her famous as well.
Yet, the biopic and Oprah’s 2010 interview revealed that Whitney…just wanted to be a woman.

She wanted to become a wife and mom (which she did) and tried to hang on to that as long as she could. However, due to her famous she was, it was difficult for her to hang on to.

As she told Oprah, she didn’t even know what an icon was…but to many, she became it.

I believe what Bassett tried to portray is that Whitney and Bobby were people who wanted an ordinary life. They wanted their marriage to work because they were in love with each other. They wanted their marriage to work for the sake of their family. For the sake of their daughter. And they wanted to prove to the world the misconceptions that they had about each of them…the princess who fell in love with the bad boy.

The movie portrays this. It portrays a young couple in love. It portrays a husband putting effort to do by his wife fair because he loves her. Most of all, it shows two people who tries to cope with fame and how a relationship can fall apart if both people don’t have their continue success.

Bassett played it smart when it came to what she wanted to portray concerning Whitney.

Other critics and fans comment that the movie wasn’t long enough, and it didn’t showcase enough of Whitney’s singing.

For this movie, I don’t think it needed an ostentatious element of Whitney’s singing. By the four songs and the snapshot of the tour, Bassett shows us that Whitney singing was at its height…but so was her life. I believe she did a fair and equal balance.

I give this movie a B+ because what I wanted to see was more of how she handled her marriage throughout the years. Yet, I can understand why Bassett did not go there.

She didn’t want to plague viewers with too much of Whitney’s personal life and how it was portrayed in the media. She wanted to strike a balance between everything that was going on in Whitney Houston’s life.

Kudos,
S