Whitney: Can I Be Me debuts this Friday on Showtime. Chris Feil takes a look at the icon's biggest soundtrack...
The Bodyguard doesn’t deserve its iconic mega-selling soundtrack. Granted, most of us have never pretended that that the film was even a whiff as good as all that glorious vocal dexterity Whitney Houston lays into her six tracks. But rest assured: the movie itself is even worse than you remember.
Among its many sins, the most egregious is how it ignores its own musical assets. The Bodyguard exists in a world where you can enter someone’s home and just happen upon an extended dance sequence being shot for a music video - but it also presents a world where that isn’t anywhere near as fun as it sounds. It spends the first act under the illusion that we give a crap about five or six things more than we do about Whitney’s voice. Why go to the creative effort to cast one of the biggest music acts of the era (and in a quasi-musical!) if you don’t know how to use her?
No sweat for Whitney, even if her acting performance netted her some harsh reviews. As ever, her musical contribution remains untouchable...
But it’s not that the film is holding out for a big musical payoff once the songs begin. The music actually comes in pretty early, existing weirdly in the background whether its the “I’m Every Woman” cover on a radio or the red herring stalker having a music video on the television. We hear a hint of “Run to You” from a character’s headphones as if the music doesn’t belong to us. If The Bodyguard were more musically attuned these bits could feel like it presented a world where music is omnipresent, but its focus remains on anything else really.
It doesn’t just miss the mark on the music, but also in presenting a believable musical world. By spending all of its focus on its absurd thriller elements, The Bodyguard’s vision of fame and celebrity is laughable to anyone who paid any passing attention to MTV, VH1, or entertainment media at the time. We’re supposed to believe that Houston’s Rachel Marron is one of the biggest titans of music and screen, yet her album launch is in some cheap ass club for 100 concert-goers? Of course it gets the impact of the music wrong when it presents it in an unrealistic context.
And if any Oscar watchers want a good chuckle, pay attention to The Bodyguard’s low-rent Oscar ceremony that looks like its set in a Gotham City library. But it does provide a meta moment of “I Have Nothing” being performed mid-faux ceremony. Life would imitate art as the song would be Oscar-nominated along with the vastly underrated “Run to You.”
It is one morose film, all the moreso because it feels so far removed from the joy of music. Whitney’s songs are left to speak for themselves, and to a cultural extent they essentially do; the movie piggybacks on the soundtrack’s success even if it was a box office success. It’s odd that it remains Whitney's musical peak when the film itself is such a musical misfire.
For a better dose of cinema, you could look to the music video for “I Will Always Love You”. In a few minutes the video does better at selling the romance than the films lethargic 2+ hour runtime, not to mention how it delivers on the beauty and drama of this incredible track. Music should make us feel something, experience something, not just lay there flat on the screen. With this career-defining moment, Whitney makes us feel everything.
Previous Soundtracking Favorites:
Evita
The First Wives Club
Big Little Lies
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Sister Act
...all installments can be found here