Just Don't Hold Your Breath
Waiting To Exhale A Two-Hour Whitney Houston Music Video

Date: December 22, 1995
By Bruce Kirkland

From The Toronto Sun
Submitted by: Larry A.


Forest Whitaker's Waiting To Exhale raises questions:

Is it a 'chick flick' or just an overlong pop music video?

Is it a classic or just cloying?

It could be Whitney Houston's coming-out party as a real actress - or just another excuse to get her pristine vocals on a soundtrack while we endure her sterile movie persona.

Or it could be Angela Bassett's new claim to fame - or a terrible wrong turn in her burgeoning Hollywood career.

The answers may depend on your gender. Waiting To Exhale divides people based on the male-female split. That despite being directed by a man - actor turned filmmaker Whitaker - and despite being co-written by a man, Ronald Bass of Rainman fame, and a woman, novelist Terry McMillan. Whitaker and Bass seem to have tapped into the 1990s Sensitive Man mythology so deeply that they let McMillan's strong voice inform everything on screen.

What Waiting To Exhale doesn't do, thankfully, is split on racial grounds, even though all the major characters are African-Americans and one character in particular - Bassett's scorned wife - utters racist remarks when her two-timing husband runs off with his Caucasian secretary.

Beyond that irrational outburst, the movie sticks to the essence of relationships: Why and when they work, although that's rarely here, and why they don't, which is primarly because men are pigs.

In the course of a year, from one New Year's Eve to the next, Exhale takes us into the labyrinth of deceptions pulled on four women friends by their loser husbands and boyfriends. Houston and Bassett plus superb support players Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon make up the quartet.

Men include Dennis Haysbert and the one-named Leon. The only guys who are not total jerks are played by the sublime Gregory Hines and action star Wesley Snipes in an uncredited cameo as a serious, sensitive man in a crisis.

For me - and maybe it is because I'm male - Waiting To Exhale is a major disappointment, largely because of the answers to those questions: It is a two-hour music video, Houston is pretty but dull, and the dynamo Bassett has been better elsewhere.

For me, this movie was so tedious I'm still Waiting To Exit.

SUN RATING: 2 OUT OF 5