'Exhale's' Fresh Air

Date: December 24, 1995
By Malcolm Gladwell, Staff Writer

From The Washington Post
Submitted by: Larry A.


At the beginning of "Waiting to Exhale," the new film based on Terry McMillan's bestseller about the lives of four black women, Bernadine (Angela Bassett) sits in front of a vanity, fixing her hair before an evening out. Then her husband appears behind her with a stunning confession: He's leaving her for a white woman.

In her rage, Bernadine charges through the house, rounding up her husband's belongings. She tears dozens of his expensive suits off their hangers, scoops up ties and shirts and shoes, throws them in his BMW and then sets the car on fire.

The scene is at once emotionally raw and absurd, hilariously overacted by Bassett, and it sets the tone for the movie. But post-Anita Hill and Mike Tyson, this is also a politically charged moment. Relations between black men and black women have rarely been worse. And Bernadine's rage -- which is only the beginning of the film's long riff on male weakness and treachery -- seems on the verge of turning "Waiting to Exhale" into a kind of black feminist manifesto.

"Would it be better if she were black?" Bernadine's husband asks.

"No," she responds in a flash of bitter irony. "It would be better if you were black."

But "Waiting to Exhale" does not turn in that direction. Every time racial politics surge to the surface, they recede just as quickly. This is not "Girlz in the Hood," trafficking in the deepest stereotypical black culture of the inner city. This is a movie about four successful women in -- of all the bleached American cities -- Phoenix. They are small-businesswomen and executives and professionals. Some of the men who frustrate and enrage them are drug addicts and layabouts. But some are doctors and lawyers.

What is interesting about "Waiting to Exhale," in fact, is how carefully ambiguous the racial context of the film is. Just when it looks as if it's beginning to be a "black film" -- one that consciously explores black themes and culture -- it turns once again into a film that just happens to be black.

This is perhaps what makes "Waiting to Exhale" an important movie, even if it is not a particularly good movie. It is an attempt to normalize, to de-pathologize the tense and emotional context of black gender relations. It gives black women and men the freedom not to get along just like everyone else.

"I don't think Terry McMillan is trying to make a statement about anything," says black critic Stanley Crouch, author of "The All-American Skin Game." "She's not trying to get herself a platinum soapbox like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She's just doing the best she can to write her version of the stuff that John Cheever and John O'Hara wrote about, that kind of deracinated, unhappy, gee-whiz, how-did-it-turn-out-to-be-like-this account of middle- and upper-middle-class life. It just happens to be the case that these are black women."

"I just wrote a few books that were honest," says McMillan, who also wrote the screenplay for the film of her novel. "I didn't know it was going to be like E.F. Hutton. Open our mouth, everybody stops."

"Waiting to Exhale" tells the story of four women, played by Bassett, Whitney Houston, Lela Rochon and Loretta Devine. Only Bassett's Bernadine is married, which means that after her marriage breaks up, the four are united in the same search for love. That search involves a bewildering and often depressing array of black men who are, with just two exceptions, self-centered, immature, faithless and weak. In one brilliant and viciously funny scene, Robin (Rochon) brings home from work a dweebish, overweight colleague who is under the illusion that he is Casanova. Their encounter is alone sufficient reason to see the movie. But it may be even better described in the book:

He rolled over on top of me, and since I could no longer breathe, let alone move, I couldn't show him how to get me in the mood. He started that slurpy kissing again. . . . He squeezed me tight against his breasts and yelled, 'God, this is good!' and then all of his weight dropped on me. Was he for real?

Ever since Ntozake Shange's 1976 breakthrough Broadway hit, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf," the complaints of black women about the worthiness of black men have been a dominant theme in black literature and film. In Alice Walker's "The Color Purple," black women find redemption only in lesbian love. In Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," black women rage over Wesley Snipes's affair with a white woman. By the time of Anita Hill and Mike Tyson, the discussion had escalated into what psychologist A.L. Reynolds argues in his recent book "Do Black Women Hate Black Men?" is a full-scale "gender war."

What is at issue in this war is loyalty: whether blacks should be airing their dirty linen in public. Black novelists Trey Ellis and Ishmael Reed have accused Morrison and Walker of racial betrayal. On the other side, black feminists have argued that black men are essentially asking that they deny themselves, to disappear, to return to a state in which they were not fully human.

"Few recall," Princeton University historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in a recent essay, "that after Bigger Thomas, in Richard Wright's 'Native Son,' accidentally killed rich, white Mary Dalton, he committed the brutal, premeditated murder of his girlfriend, the innocent black Bessie. 'Native Son' is generally summed up as the story of a racial crime in which a white woman dies and a black man emerges as the victim of society. Two generations later, Eldridge Cleaver said in 'Soul on Ice' that he raped black women for practice; he was honing his skills before attacking white women, who were for him real women."

These are themes inevitably reflected in "Waiting to Exhale," in the frank and unrelenting commentary by the four female characters about the men around them. It's something as well that McMillan herself was conscious of when she wrote the book and the screenplay.

"Some black men don't feel they are who they would like to be, for a whole lot of reasons, racism one," McMillan says. "They would prefer that we would be a little bit more understanding, sensitive to their problems, obsequious, more fawning. And what they don't understand is that this is what we have done for years and years, and we're tired of that. We want someone who can be a man and stand on his feet despite all the [expletive]. We're still standing up. Why can't you?"

For McMillan, this is an intensely personal issue.

"When I was writing my novel," she continues, "my son's father was like, 'Okay, do your thing.' Until the book was actually published. Then he had to look at things a little differently, and he didn't want to. I tried for three years to get him to understand that what I am doesn't make you any less of what you are. But he couldn't, and I had to leave him ... You don't want a whiner. You want someone to stand on their own two feet."

But at the same time, she says, she tried to leaven the message of both the book and movie versions of "Waiting to Exhale."

"Some black men are going to say that it's women like her who don't appreciate us and our struggle, but that's not true," McMillan says. "I deliberately chose five men who had problems, and I had these women fall in love with them and have unhealthy relationships. But that's not to say that all black men aren't good or healthy or compassionate ... It would be a very different movie if all the men were good and healthy and compassionate. It would be a boring movie."

At the end of the film, in fact, two solid and sensitive men emerge to balance out the wayward men of the first half. First a carpenter (Gregory Hines) moves in next door to Gloria, the character played by Loretta Devine. Then Bernadine meets a lawyer (Wesley Snipes) in a bar and the two immediately connect. His wife is at home in Washington, D.C., dying of cancer. He is honest and open.

And when he tells Bernadine that his wife is white, she looks into his eyes and nods her head, and this time it means nothing at all.