- Network: Lifetime
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 17, 2015
Critic Reviews
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It’s a surgical examination rather than a hatchet job, but neither is satisfying for those who would prefer the story wasn’t exhumed at all.
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Whitney may be a largely inoffensive and competently executed biopic, but it also misses the point of its existence.
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The stars are very likable but simply not powerful enough to make you forget the real-life, heavily covered people they're playing. But the movie's precision and empathy can't be denied.
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Houston’s life comes across as if outlined in simple, declarative statements with limited depth of emotion and introspection.
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Though DaCosta and Escarpeta each creates a sympathetic character--at times, the picture feels meant to make you forget you ever saw "Being Bobby Brown"--they lack chemistry. For all the script insists otherwise, their love, and thus the film about it, feels something less than necessary.
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Bassett refuses to cast blame for the troubles, and we're left with a portrait that has plenty of love--just not a whole lot of insight or edge.
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For two hours, this film cherry-picks moments of Ms. Houston’s life--some recognizable, some not--and stitches them together into a perplexing, not altogether comforting quilt.
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Average acting and troubled storytelling can be forgiven in a film about music if the music is transcendent. But Lifetime couldn’t secure the rights to any Brown or Houston hits. So we get actors lip-syncing to imitators. Often the lip-syncing isn’t even synched.
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Maybe it's the writing, or perhaps it's the acting, but Whitney paints Houston and Brown as facile, shallow, and emotionally stunted kids who played at having deep, Romeo-and-Juliet-style passion.
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Yaya DaCosta ably embodies Houston's grace, confidence and teasing good humor--but she isn't given much to work with.... [Whitney's] music remains timeless, though, and that's when Whitney comes to life.
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Bassett’s direction is more than competent. She clearly has the instincts to tell a good story and elicits superb performances to do so. Her pacing is off, and some of the scene changes too abrupt, but Bassett knows what she’s doing when it comes to actors, which becomes paramount when working with an uninspired script.
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While neither overly salacious or reverent, Whitney--which focuses almost exclusively on her relationship with Brown--lacks dynamism in telling the tale of a very dynamic life, and falls short of illuminating anything about Houston that both diehard fans and casual observers of pop culture didn’t already know.
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The decision to focus just on Houston's most meteorically successful years--where, for a little while, she probably was happy--makes Whitney a fairly flattering portrait that is only lightly a cautionary tale.
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Whitney is an odd mix. The love feels real, and you begrudge them none of it. Yet the problems are just as real, and it's hard to see what could have averted them.
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For the most part, the movie is a candy-colored whirl through the shoulder-padded late 1980s.
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What emerges is surprisingly compelling, if decidedly constricted take on the singer’s life, focusing squarely on her relationship with Bobby Brown, and ending well before her untimely death at age 48.
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Bassett leaves a game DaCosta on the sidelines, only trotting her out to recreate performances that look cheap and feel alarmingly like filler. [16 Jan 2015, p.71]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 11
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Mixed: 1 out of 11
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Negative: 8 out of 11
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Jan 21, 2015