Netflix’s faux Whitney Houston movie Beauty should have gone for broke

polygon.com:

Netflix’s movie Beauty isn’t a Whitney Houston biopic — at least, not officially. The Chi creator Lena Waithe changed all the familiar names in Houston’s life to allegorical signifiers for this story about a young, Black, queer Gospel singer waiting on her ascension to stardom. The word “queer” is particularly important here, and it’s probably the primary reason this film follows the chronological events of Houston’s early life but doesn’t have her family’s backing or include her songs.

The circumstances certainly present a challenge for director Andrew Dosunmu (Mother of George). But it should also provide plenty of freedom. Filmmakers who aren’t beholden to pleasing the estate of music’s biggest female pop star should have carte blanche to take risks. Unfortunately, Waithe and Dosunmu don’t throw caution to the wind. In their hands, Beauty is a staid, soporific story that swims through shallow narrative waters.

For much of the film, Dosunmu plays a visual game of chicken. In the opening scene, Beauty (Gracie Marie Bradley) stands speechless at a mic in a recording studio. While she’s frozen there, her mind leaps back in time, through a montage that sees her at church, at a gay club, and lying romantically in the arms of Jasmine (Aleyse Shannon). Dosunmu uses that shot of Beauty in the studio as his home base. It’s the end point of her journey. The rest of the movie, told in a series of flashbacks coated in a gorgeous, golden-colored vintage patina, recalls how she arrived there.

Beauty comes from a deeply religious, fractured household. Her brothers Cain (Micheal Ward) and Abel (Kyle Bary) embody pure rage and good, respectively. Her mother is a well-known Gospel singer (Niecy Nash as a version of Cissy Houston) who