I Wanna Dance With Somebody: Telling a Story, Not Showing It

There is a fairly common expression taught in screenwriting classes across the country and it’s “show, don’t tell.” The basic premise of this statement is that, when there is the opportunity to give the audience information by showing them it instead of having a character state it, they should take that opportunity because it makes for more interesting storytelling. I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the biopic about the late Whitney Houston, takes every opportunity to do the opposite, much to the detriment of the movie.

I Wanna Dance With Somebody tells the story of the rise and fall of the career of Whitney Houston (Naomi Ackie, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker). She has to navigate a series of complex relationships in her life including her parents (Tamara Tunie, Law and Order: SVU and Clarke Peters, John Wick), her record producer (Stanley Tucci, The Hunger Games), her husband (Ashton Sanders, Moonlight), and her manager/best friend/ex-girlfriend (Nafessa Williams, Black Lightning).

There are a series of problems with this movie that are all sort of interconnected. First off, the story is too complex for a two-and-a-half-hour runtime that feels compelled to somewhat adhere to the standard screenplay outline format. The first half of the movie is basically concerned entirely with the positives that happen within Whitney’s life while the second half is everything falling apart. Because of this, the key negative moments in the first half like the fact that she is forced to forsake her relationship with Robyn for the sake of her career, does not have emotional weight beyond that initial moment. This is compounded by the fact that every relationship is given basically equal weight, meaning that none of them get fully developed as much as they could have. For a movie like this with a deeply flawed lead character that ends in such tragedy, Elvis handles the story a lot better by hyper-focusing on one aspect for the sake of the movie.

As a result of this, and the majority of the true worst aspects being crammed into the last half of the movie, a lot of information has to be explained to the audience via dialogue instead of allowing the audience to watch it happen. There’s a moment after Whitney is in rehab where she meets with Bobby Brown and she says to him that the drugs were in her life before they met, however up until that point the only time we saw her do any drugs was smoking marijuana as a teenager before she got famous. That’s not to say that the movie portrays Bobby Brown as the entire cause of her addiction, however it certainly does not help. There is also the moment where it is revealed that her father is stealing her money which only has a passing reference in the form of him giving out purchasing cards to employees which is portrayed, at best in the scene, a poor business decision and not as something nefarious.

There is some slight adjustment for this, namely that the movie decides that the viewer must already know the story and devotes screen time to showing highlights rather than showing key information. The problem with this is that there is the key internal struggle that Whitney has over the course of the movie (and explored in 2017’s Whitney: Can I Be Me? on Netflix) that never has a chance to develop despite being the key driving factor for Whitney’s self-destructive behavior. The narrative that Whitney has to be a different person for different aspects of her life, none of which line up with the person that she truly is, does not get explored and is instead just stated a few times in dialogue. Because the viewer is watching what is portrayed as a reliable narrative of events, this makes her come off as petulant more than sympathetic, which is a failure on the part of the script and edit.

Considering the movie is based in reality, spoiling the ending is not exactly a concern but the way the movie ends is a little bit of a mixed bag. There is a tell in the editing of the final portion of the movie that there were multiple cuts of the sequence of events before they settled on this one and it’s definitely not the best choice. The scene of Whitney getting ready to do the drugs and take the bath where she dies is totally not needed, especially considering it ends like most biopics with white text on a black background explaining the circumstances of the subject’s death. The ending would have played better had it omitted that and gone directly from the scene of her buying the drugs and having the conversation with the bartender to the flashback to the 1994 American Music Awards and then ended. The movie would still end on a positive emotional note that still has a somber undercurrent but without hitting the viewer over the head with it.

Outside the movie itself, Sony really dropped the ball with distributing this movie, almost as if it is set up to fail. Movies like this, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis, Straight Outta Compton, and other musical biopics (if it was made today, Walk the Line as well) use giant concert venues as set pieces in the way action movies use giant fights. That said, beyond the visual spectacle, these sequences play with sound in ways never before possible with technological advancements in both production (during the filming and post-production on a film) and in exhibition (what technology is available in the theater to optimize the viewing experience). To an extent, audiences are literate enough in these things where trailers for upcoming movies like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I are featuring behind the scenes footage to tell the viewer why they need to see this movie in a theater instead of waiting for it to hit streaming. There are two scenarios for Sony on this one and either one is as bad as the other if they want the movie to be a success: either it was not shot or edited with Dolby Atmos or other high-end viewing experiences in mind, or Sony opted to dump the movie for release in theaters the week after Avatar: The Way of Water, thus locking it out of most (if not all in the local market) premium viewing formats. Considering this is the same calendar year that Elvis was given a week to command premium formats, this is a massive snub by Sony when it could have been delayed to mid-January of next year.

At the end of the day, the movie is perfectly passable and, despite being over two and a half hours long, never feels slow. Regardless of how the viewer sees the film, they will find something to enjoy in it because the performances are all great and the musical set pieces are fun. That said, considering the movie is not playing in premium formats and, depending on which theater one goes to the sound quality may actually not be as good as a home surround sound system, this may be a film worth waiting for streaming to watch. Since Sony produced and distributed it, it probably will end up on either Starz or Netflix at some point in the relatively near future.

Final Rating: 6.5/10