Exhilarating 'Exhale'

Date: December 22, 1995
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff

From The Boston Globe
Submitted by: Larry A.


MOVIE REVIEW WAITING TO EXHALE

Directed by: Forest Whitaker

Screenplay by: Terry McMillan & Ronald Bass (novel: McMillan)

Starring: Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, Lela Rochon, Gregory Hines, Dennis Haysbert, Mykelti Williamson, Michael Beach, Leon, Wendell Pierce, Donald Adeosun Faison

At: Copley Place, Cinema 57, suburbs Rated: R (language and some strong sexuality)


"Waiting to Exhale" is both a throwback to the glossy women's film of Hollywood's glory days and a smart contemporary screenful of black sensibility. It's heartfelt, funny and funky, richly textured and smoothly made, and it's probably going to define crossover this season -it'll go gold as surely as its soundtrack will.

Its story of four women helping one another through a bad year in Phoenix is both a star vehicle and an impressive ensemble piece. Certainly Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett are going to sell most of the tickets, but the most impressive achievement here just may be that of director Forest Whitaker - because his hand is so invisible and the film's moves are so right.

All four women from the pages of Terry McMillan's best-selling novel have two things in common. They move with competence and aplomb through their professional lives; and when it comes to men they're all living in the Bosnia of love. This opens the door to lots of girlfriend stuff, but so sure-handedly does the leading quartet inscribe the respective characters that they never blur or lose their distinctive and highly defined personalities, despite the similarities in their romantic misadventures. The men they go for are either freeloaders or liars, or both. But there's never any question that these women can handle whatever comes along - or what doesn't.

Houston plays Savannah, getting a TV career in gear, still letting herself be nudged by her mother, wondering whether she should resume a relationship with an old flame now (he tells her) unhappily married. The role represents a huge leap forward for her, a shedding of the discomfort and awkwardness she projected in "The Bodyguard." For all the money it made, "The Bodyguard" was a mediocre movie, and the big reason was the director's inability to induce Houston to relax into her role. Here she's very much at home in exactly the Hollywood-diva way the movie demands.

The only thing you wonder about Savannah is why she doesn't see how accomplished and independent a woman she is. But then the same can be said of all four. Bassett plays Bernadine, who helped her husband start a successful business, only to find that he's now dumping her to marry his white bookkeeper. Also, he's hiding his assets in an effort to shortchange her. This means Bassett gets to play rage against fragility. Handling the film's biggest emotional arc with honeyed ease, she convinces us further that she's steadily advancing, step by step, into one of the decade's major careers. The pitfall here is that the anger felt by her character will be a turnoff for some. But Bassett fills everything she does with such fullness and warmth that there's never the slightest drop-off in appeal.

Lela Rochon has fun with the bad-girl role of Robin, the insurance-company sharpshooter who chooses unwisely when it comes to men. She's the one who comes closest to delivering a modern black take on the classic tough-cookie-working-girl movies of the '30s. That was the last decade when women really got their due in American movies, but these four convince you there could be some changes.

In a way, Loretta Devine's Gloria is the most touching. She runs a hair-styling shop, frets about keeping her 16-year-old son straight, brings no rigor at all to the matter of weight control and passes her days with no man - unlike her girlfriends, who keep having to deal with dolts. So Gloria is the one most removed from Hollywood glamour and closest to believable life.

One of the film's themes is the way each woman becomes aware of her gifts. It represents something of a leap forward in American pop culture for film to catch up to TV's lead and present a screenful of modern black women who are all successful professionals.

But "Waiting to Exhale" is a thing of vitality and chemistry, not of sociology. You won't doubt for a moment the way these women shore one another up. You won't forget the way Devine's Gloria looks at her sleeker girlfriends, registering the difference between her looks and theirs. You'll be hanging on every mood swing of Bassett's exquisite Bernadine as she alternates between anger and worry, selling her husband's possessions for $1 apiece at a garage sale, then smiling a smile that would melt the IRS when something nice comes into her life.

But "Waiting to Exhale" is as much about Houston's glamour as it is about Bassett's emotional range. Its assumptions are in fact as gratifying as the movie itself. It takes the view that black women can carry a big-bucks studio production and inhabit on their terms high-powered studio artifice of the sort that has always been integral to America's dreams.

The spotless upper-middle-class comfort we see here is the contemporary equivalent of all the white pianos at all those penthouse cocktail parties that offered escape for Depression audiences in the '30s. These women not only are spirited and earthy, they're dynamite divas who prove black women can command screen worlds apart from the gritty ghetto settings where most of their employment so far has been.

And how many Hollywood movies lately have been able to weave into their stories sex scenes that play like the real thing, yet are often funny? "Waiting to Exhale" makes it look easy, especially in a scene when Robin discovers that a man who in theory would be good for her is unbearably clumsy and boring in bed.

The men aren't all losers, but most of them are, and the actors soldiering through these roles avoid caricature. That's another instance of the savvy that impresses you right down the line. Watch, for example, Donald Adeosun Faison's performance as Gloria's teenage son, who convinces us he loves his mother and wants to do the right thing despite hormonal imperatives. The inexhaustible spirit of the well-matched quartet and the surprising emotional subtleties take this film places most soap operas only dream of.