Man, What A Disappointment

Date: December 22, 1995
By John Hartl, Movie Reviewer

From The Seattle Times
Submitted by: Larry A.


It feels like a comedy, and it's full of funny, punchy, profane one-liners lifted directly from Terry McMillan's 1992 bestseller.

Why, then, is "Waiting to Exhale" such a claustrophobic drag? In spite of the contributions of several talented actors, led by the dynamic Angela Bassett, why do its people seem more like mouthpieces than three-dimensional characters? Perhaps it's because the book had more of a sense of place and social context - and a suggestion that the four African-American women at the center of the story had a few interests outside of landing a man.

Possibly it's because the bedroom scenes are so grotesquely perfunctory ("Does he think he just did something here?" complains one woman in mid-coitus) that you wonder why anyone here is interested in sex. The book didn't force you to visualize these episodes, but director Forest Whitaker can't stop shoving them in your face.

Maybe it's because the script wants to tie things up too neatly, finding a convenient moral for each of the four stories.

"I need someone to hold me, even if it is a damn lie," says the abandoned and humiliated wife played by Bassett.

"I might be a good influence on him," says an ever-hopeful type, played by Lela Rochon, who's trying to excuse her latest boyfriend's selfishness.

"You know what we all have in common," says a frustrated TV producer played by Whitney Houston. "None of us has a man."

The minute they utter such desperate dialogue you know the filmmakers are going to supply some pre-fab lessons in self-respect. The fate of their married, deceitful, equivocating lovers is even more predictable.

Only Loretta Devine, as a single mother who's interested in the gentle handyman next door (Gregory Hines), gets a chance to break out of this one-note whining cycle and give her scenes a spontaneous quality. Too bad she doesn't get enough screen time with Hines to make their relationship develop naturally. As a result, their last scene, for all the poignancy the actors bring to it, feels contrived.

Whitaker never gets a rhythm going that can smooth the transitions from one story to the next, and the script leaps awkwardly about. For ironic counterpoint, he underscores a testy balcony scene with Nino Rota's music from Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet," or he shows Bassett watching "Nanny and the Professor" on her big-screen television after setting fire to her adulterous husband's clothes.

But the ideas are stronger than the execution. Mostly he makes you appreciate the casually revolutionary spirit of Spike Lee's low-budget debut film, "She's Gotta Have It," in which a woman takes control of her love life by openly playing the field with three men. That may have been nine years ago, yet Lee's little 84-minute movie still seems sexier and more contemporary than the tortured two hours of "Waiting to Exhale."