Hot Air: 'Waiting' Too Concerned With How It Looks And Sounds

Date: December 22, 1995
By Michael Wilmington, Movie Critic

From Chicago Tribune
Submitted by: Larry A.


"Waiting to Exhale" -- a film I wish I'd liked a lot more -- is set in one of those worlds the movies don't often depict. It shows us a modern Southwestern milieu of buppies (upwardly mobile, urban African-American women in their 30s) looking for love.

Based by co-writer Terry McMillan on her huge 1992 bestseller and acted by a nearly all-star cast, this movie also is imaginatively, lovingly staged by Forest Whitaker.

Why, then, does so much of it seem like a TV show -- or two or three -- we've seen before? Maybe because the movie deals with a new generation, people who often walk to a TV beat, dress in a TV style.

"Waiting to Exhale" centers on the friendship of four young women and their attempts to get relationships going with the available men in Phoenix. Three of the women have substantial jobs -- TV producer Savannah Jackson (Whitney Houston), insurance agent Robin Stokes (Lela Rochon) and beauty shop owner Gloria Matthews (Loretta Devine). And the fourth, Bernadine Harris (Angela Bassett), is married to a corporate bookkeeper whose business she helped establish.

They all seem to live a kind of television-commercial dream of middle-class comfort. Yet, if there's something bracingly new about this world, there's also something gratingly familiar, like a TV talk show full of frustrated singles and freaky partners, baring their souls and zapping each other.

The women in "Waiting to Exhale" are stunners, but the men mostly are a sorry lot. If they don't have drug or liquor problems, they're too fat. If they aren't already married, they're tomcats racing from one woman to another, or -- like Bernadine's husband -- shacking up with their secretaries and generally making everyone miserable. Yet, since McMillan drew her men -- and women -- in the book with humor and insight, we never feel she's being too unfair or malicious.

But her characters are, at least when they're talking about their love lives. And perhaps it's because they have unrealistic expectations. In the movie, Savannah, fed up with the Denver singles scene and job market, decides to move to buddy Bernadine's hometown -- at just the moment when Bernadine's bookkeeper husband John (Michael Beach) skedaddles with his secretary.

What of the others? Gloria's former boyfriend David (Giancarlo Esposito), father of her son Tarik (Donald Adeoson Faison), has just revealed his homosexuality to her, and Robin has a gallery of losers that includes chubby Michael (Wendell Pierce) and badman Russell (Leon).

McMillan's novel alternates the women's stories in separate chapters, with Savannah and Robin telling their tales in first person. The movie, co-written with Ron Bass ("Rain Man," 'The Joy Luck Club") tries something trickier. It weaves the four narratives together with a song underscore, mostly by Babyface.

Rock or pop underscores can be used brilliantly -- as in Scorsese's "GoodFellas" and "Casino" -- but Babyface's score (with its hit album strategies) has a sameness that begins to dull the movie's edges. Sometimes it gives you the feeling of being trapped in an elevator.

As an actor, with his big goofy smile and melancholy eyes, Forest Whitaker has a sensitivity that can seem incongruous or delightfully eccentric. In movies like "Bird," "The Crying Game" or "Smoke," he rarely hits a line on the obvious beat. And those offbeat qualities, the tenderness and humor, infuse Whitaker's direction, too.

The best sections of "Waiting" -- the ones with Angela Bassett -- have fire. Bassett is an exciting actress to watch because of the way she challenges her fellow players on screen. She shook up the devilishly calm Laurence Fishburne in their first scenes in "Boyz N the Hood" and "What's Love Got to Do With It?"

When Bassett has her great blowup scene in "Waiting to Exhale" -- tearing through her husband's closets after he leaves, flinging his clothes into boxes and then stomping out to the driveway and torching his BMW -- she blasts the movie into life. Her approach, that relentless strike on emotion, is the opposite of the one Whitney Houston takes.

Major pop singers who later become star movie actors -- like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand, Cher or Elvis Presley -- often develop screen personalities that seem logical extensions of their "song" personalities, their original "pop" voices.

But Houston, in both 1992's "The Bodyguard" and here, acts at a different pitch than she sings. In her dramatic scenes, she seems to retreat into a more sarcastic, aggressive character than the throbbing, all-stops-out romantic of her big ballads. And maybe that's necessary. Her style -- with its drain-every-drop intensity -- may be too big for film drama.

Houston's Savannah, just like her besieged superstar in "Bodyguard," lacks spark. She's too relaxed, too sure of herself. And, in a way, so is the movie. Lela Rochon and Loretta Devine have good moments (though the movie robs Gloria of the big hospital scene that's in the book.)

Of the men, Gregory Hines has a token mensch role as Gloria's neighbor. And Dennis Haysbert, as Savannah's unctuous lover Kenneth, sometimes bears a disconcerting resemblance to Colin Powell. Wendell Pierce has a funny moment or two as Michael.

But Wesley Snipes, who's unbilled, is so terrific in his scenes with Bassett toward the end that you wonder why he doesn't play Prince Charming more often. After all the movie's deadbeats and growling bozos, Snipes has the unenviable task of playing Mr. Right -- a civil rights attorney named James whose wife is dying of breast cancer and who meets and romances Bernadine with tender solicitude. The scene trembles on the brink of the ersatz, but the sizzling duo makes it real. If only the rest of the movie were as good.

There's an audience, understandably frustrated at the constant, unrelenting exploitation of fantasy and violence in modern movies, that will welcome "Waiting to Exhale" and love its more realistic, common-sense approach to things.

The problem with the movie, though, resembles something Terry McMillan jokes about in her book. Like the four friends at its center, "Waiting to Exhale" spends too much time concentrating on how it looks and how it sounds, and not enough on saying what it feels. In this movie, there's too much music and not enough dancing.

"WAITING TO EXHALE"
* *1/2