'It's a sisters kind of movie'
Movie Waiting to Exhale stirs discussion, analysis

Date: December 26, 1995

From The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
Submitted by: Larry A.


For two hours, they waited to expound.

During Friday night's Waiting to Exhale screening at San Jose's Century Capitol Theatre, a group of 250 mostly African-American women had laughed together, cried together, cursed men out loud and nudged each other constantly.

But when the film about four women and their travails with the opposite sex had ended, they didn't just go home. They thronged to a nearby restaurant to talk and talk and talk - until they closed the place.

From Washington, D.C., to Des Moines, Iowa, to San Jose, screenings of the film based on the Terry McMillan best-seller of the same name are becoming cultural sensations. In groups of hundreds, female friends are selling out theatres. Screenings are being followed by living-room chats, endless rehashing over the telephone and large-scale female bonding sessions.

Some speculate that what the Million Man March became for black men, Waiting to Exhale screenings could become to black women. As the fictional characters of Savannah (Whitney Houston), Robin (Lela Rochon), Gloria (Loretta Devine) and Bernadine (Angela Bassett) are dissected, analyzed, embraced, scrutinized, supported and dissed, female filmgoers are analyzing their own decisions, choices and lives.

"My mom is more of the Gloria type - but she's thin," Tamera Hogg, 23, a student at the University of California at Davis, said Friday night at one table. "Me, I'm more Bernadine."

Dunia Noel, 24, shook her head in agreement. "I found myself saying, 'That reminds me of so-and-so,' " the San Jose woman said. "You could see people you knew in all the characters."

'Read the book and loved it'

The get-together was organized by Anita Williams, 38, a parks and recreation worker who just graduated with a business degree .

"I had read the book and loved it and then the Million Man March got me thinking, 'Could I get 100 women together in the South Bay,"' Williams said. "Women of color, when we endure trial or tribulation, we tend to keep it inside. We don't go to counselling or to agencies. This year I decided that we must begin to tap this untapped potential in the South Bay."

The Waiting to Exhale opening provided the perfect opportunity. Indeed, women all over the United States have been calling 20th Century Fox Studios to arrange special screenings. Oprah had the entire cast on television Thursday. And young women like Stephanie Phillips-Jones, 21, of San Jose, started inviting their mothers and grandmothers to the movies.

"It's a sisters kind of movie," said Phillips-Jones, who trekked to Monterey, Calif., Friday to see the film because San Jose theatres had all sold out.

While the film has opened to generally favorable reviews, the few scathing reports have tended to come from male critics. A male reviewer in the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post opined that it's a "glossy, cardboard-thin soap opera." "Men are swine," started the review by a critic at the Kansas City Star. "Not all men. But most of them." And the film never gets beyond that point, he said.

But not all men who see the film are crawling under their seats.

Movie Is For Everyone

"This movie is for everyone," said Ronald Jones, 33, an engineer who was one of a handful of men who attended the local screening and the discussion group. "It shows men the concerns of women. It shows women the role they play in the men they attract. If the women behaved as objects, they tended to be treated that way."

His wife, Gwen Jones, 37, an accountant, said that despite talk of some "male-bashing" in the movie, both she and her husband laughed at the same parts. "Well," he corrected, "some of the same parts."

Nadine Watson, 31, a software engineer, said she did not relate to a lot of the leading ladies' romantic escapades because she married her 31-year-old engineer husband, Tony Watson, right after high school. But she said the film was a good educational tool for her husband, especially the part where one of the characters exacts revenge on a husband who left her for a white woman. "I wouldn't have just burned up the car with the fancy clothes in it," she said.

The book, which has sold 3 million copies, involves four savvy black career women in Phoenix. Aside from the lessons about bad deeds some men will do, one of the story's appealing facets is that the women are all beautiful, intelligent and financially successful; no welfare mothers here.

"It's the first time a story of black women has been shared that we can relate to," said Tisha Montgomery, 25, a telecommunications worker. "We can't relate to Fried Green Tomatoes."

"But it's not a good portrayal of black women," added Detanya Stringer, 22, a university student who brought her mother, Ruby Stringer, 42, to the showing.

The main characters are always jumping into be with men, she complained, and during these romantic trysts only once was any reference made to condoms.

- Waiting to Exhale is playing at the Faubourg.