Film Review: Waiting To Exhale

Date: December 22, 1995
By Liam Lacey

From The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Submitted by: Larry A.


Directed by Forest Whitaker
Written by Terry McMillan and Ronald Bass
Starring Angela Bassett, Whitney Houston and Gregory Hines

Soul divas and beautiful wallflowers
In another story about gorgeous people with small problems, a group of smart, attractive, successful women obsess over their manlessness.

LISTEN, girlfriends, there's a Hollywood women's movement going on. Waiting To Exhale, based on the bestselling 1992 novel by Terry McMillan (who co-wrote the screenplay) is the latest in the fall cycle of Hollywood women-bonding films, which includes Moonlight and Valentino, How To Make An American Quilt and Now and Then, all mainstream studio movies about women who learn that fostering friendships with other women is more rewarding than mooning over men.

Waiting To Exhale also marks the feature film directing debut of Forest Whitaker (he directed one film for cable), the commanding actor in Platoon, The Color of Money and The Crying Game. Unfortunately, as a director, Whitaker suffers from the same syndrome as Sean Penn did with The Crossing Guard: he tries far too hard to show he belongs in the director's chair. The result is a distracting and gimmicky use of the camera - circling around a dancing couple, melting in languorous dissolves, zooming in for a greeting-card image of raindrops on a window against a bright sunset. Whitaker's rendering of the story through voice-overs, hip-talking deejays, and four separate interwoven storylines is unnecessarily complex - it runs a ponderous two hours - for an essentially simple premise.

As in McMillan's novel, the movie follows, over the course of a year, the misadventures of four smart, successful and attractive African- American women who live in Phoenix. They go from one manless New Year's Eve to the next, with a few hot nights in between.

There's the brittle Savannah (Whitney Houston), a television producer who finds herself hooked up with an old boyfriend - a lying, handsome, married, smooth operator - who has a romantic patter that would make Barry White squirm.

Savannah's best friend Bernadine (Angela Bassett) has man troubles of her own. Her uptight, millionaire entrepreneur husband tells her he's dumping her for his white, younger bookeeper.

Their mutual friend Robin (Lela Rochon), a tiger in the bedroom or the advertising boardroom, who prefers "handsome, big-stick" dudes like Troy, a married crack addict, over wealthy and devoted men like Michael, a chubby little munchkin, whose sexual performances last as long as a sneeze.

What in the world is a girl to do? Gloria (Loretta Devine), the one woman who doesn't resemble a runway model, takes a different approach. She runs her hair salon and doesn't sleep with married men or losers. Consequently, she's miserably celibate, until her waiting finally pays off, in the form of a hopelessly idealized widower (Gregory Hines), who moves in across the street.

Whitaker, the seasoned actor, allows his cast to offer some touching, isolated scenes: Bassett, stone-faced in anger as the spurned wife; Hines and Devine, delightfully awkward in their growing attraction. But there are too many others that are shallow and predictable, and for its scenes of bubbly ensemble camaraderie, Waiting To Exhale never escapes the queasy aura of Melrose Place: just another story about beautiful people with small problems. Add to this the film's busy, cloying soundtrack, featuring every soul diva from Whitney to Aretha to Roberta, and Waiting To Exhale comes across like the world's longest soft-soul music video.

The soul divas sing in the background almost constantly - in the lonely scenes, in the love scenes and in almost every scene where the women are together at a bar, in a car or at a birthday party. Their crooning underlines the real subject of Waiting To Exhale, which is men. Men, with all their treachery, dishonesty, sexual inadequacies and annoying lack of availability.

The complaints echo a truism of our times - that wonderful women over 30 are gathering dust while attractive, straight single men are as rare as virgin births. Still, casting women as glamorous as Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett as pining wallflowers may stretch the point to absurdity.

"I still look good," says Savannah/Whitney plaintively to her friends - which is a little like the Venus de Milo observing that she still looks statuesque. And in a laudable demonstration of the strength of their sisterly solidarity, not one of the sisters suggests that she kindly shut up.