'Exhale,' The Gang's All Here
Paths Of Four Black Women Lead To Film Of Shared Experience

Date: December 22, 1995
By Dave Kehr

From The New York Daily News
Submitted by: Larry A.


WAITING TO EXHALE. Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett. Directed by Forest Whitaker. At area theaters. Time: 120 mins. Rated R. 3 Stars

FOREST WHITAKER'S FILM OF "WAITING TO Exhale," adapted from the best-selling novel by Terry McMillan, plays its audience like a pipe organ.

In this omnibus tale of four African-American women dealing with the feckless men of Phoenix, every line seems designed to produce howls of delighted recognition, every plot twist to yield sighs of sympathetic despair.

It isn't the sort of movie that tries to show its public anything new, but instead means to reinforce a sense of shared experience and common problems, and on that score it succeeds.

The screenplay is the work of McMillan and Ron Bass, the writer who initiated the cycle of multi-story confessionals with his script for 1993's "The Joy Luck Club." The formula hasn't changed. Take four women, each with a single strongly defined character trait, and follow them through a series of romantic disappointments, occasionally interrupted by mother-daughter conflicts. With so many identification figures, the viewer is bound to find herself in at least one of them, and recognize her friends in the others.

The most idealized figure is Whitney Houston's Savannah Jackson, who is young, beautiful, talented, well off (she has moved to Phoenix to become a television news producer) and mysteriously unable to attract a suitable mate. She's torn between a sponging pretty boy (Jeffrey Sams) and an old boyfriend (Dennis Haysbert) who never stops promising to leave his wife, and never does.

One small step closer to Earth is Angela Bassett's Bernadine Harris, whose prosperous businessman husband has just abandoned her and her two children to run off with his white bookkeeper. Bernadine plunges into a spectacular rage, destroying her husband's designer wardrobe and burning his BMW in the driveway. Her road to recovery begins when she encounters a mysterious stranger (Wesley Snipes, in an unbilled cameo) in a hotel bar.

Director Whitaker shifts the tone to satire and ridicule for Lela Rochon's Robin Stokes, a marketing executive with a stunning body and a libido to match. Robin keeps falling for shifty, dangerous sexy types (like Mykelti Williamson's Troy) in spite of her determination to take up with someone safe, conventional and successful (Wendell Pierce's Michael, with whom she shares a broadly funny sex scene).

Finally, Whitaker moves into relative naturalism for Loretta Devine's Gloria Johnson, who is neither fabulously wealthy nor untouchably glamorous. Long divorced, Gloria has devoted her attention to her son (Donald Adeosun Faison), but now that he is off to college, her thoughts shift to the lonely widower (Gregory Hines) across the street.

None of the characters has enough screen time to acquire real depth, though Devine gives Gloria some real substance and conviction.

Yet, fully rounded, convincing characters aren't what this sort of exercise is about what's needed is just enough of an outline to allow the audience to fill in their own perceptions, or to extrapolate from their own experience. Whitaker, a fine actor ("Bird") here directing his first theatrical film, gets the job done.

(R: Strong language, adult situations.)