Holy hormones! The Preacher’s Wife has Whitney Houston renouncing sex in the bid for sainthood. JOHNATHAN ROMNEY is not happy
THERE are many things to respect Whitney Houston for: Like the fact that her song I Will Always Love You is the number one favourite to be played at funerals; or her glacial composure when being propositioned by Serge Gainsbourg on French TV. But despite The Bodyguard and Waiting To Exhale – and the fact that Screen International has listed her as Hollywood’s most powerful female star – it’s hard to see her as a movie personality. Perhaps it’s because Whitney Houston is a brand name first and foremost – a name that figures in every easy-listening CD collection. She’s a brand name, not as in Sony or DreamWorks, but as in Badedas – the relaxant queen.
There’s nothing mythical about Whitney, for all the Metropolis robo-goddess drag she sported in The Bodyguard. Madonna was clearly destined for celluloid, but as a pop star Whitney has always aspired to the cosy approachability of the chat-show queen or fitness-video host. In The Preacher’s Wife, she’s gone one step further in domestication – here she’s seen taking the kids to school, negotiating with the child- minder, making testy breakfast-time banter with her husband. She’s become the black American answer to supermum.
The Preacher’s Wife is the Christmas movie that got away, now reaching South Africa like the last of the microwaved turkey. If you’re allergic to comfort and joy, be warned: glad tidings are all you’ll get from this unapologetic religious feelgood film – Songs of Praise with the best rhythm section Disney money can buy.
Based on the 1947 Cary Grant comedy The Bishop’s Wife, Penny Marshall’s film has Denzel Washington as a beaming, dapperly raincoated angel sent to bring good cheer to Courtney Vance, the beleaguered black pastor of a black community under threat from mean-spirited property developer Gregory Hines. Whitney, the preacher’s wife, does all she can to whip her man out of the doldrums, mainly by getting her gospel choir to pump up the decibels for Jesus.
But Vance is unimpressed by Washington’s super-smooth gaucheness, and Houston all too impressed; before long she’s feeling undomestic urges and singing torch songs at the local nightspot.
The image of black America here is so cosy it makes The Cosby Show look like gritty urban reportage. The script pays lip- service to the realities of modern American life – crumbling communities, crime, absent fathers – but they seem like timid borrowings from John Singleton films.
The Preacher’s Wife promotes sexlessness as a cardinal virtue. Houston wears one of those dinky little knitted hats that unfailingly signals a sex-free zone. Even when she’s supposedly feeling passionate stirrings in a clinging evening dress, her nightclub song is adulterated with a Hollywood Bowlful of artificial sweetener. The film is a reminder of how Hollywood still can’t encompass black sexuality. Even when you have a hot-date billing like Houston and Washington, they can’t exchange more than a peck because he’s an angel. And she can’t be getting up to anything steamy with Vance: he’s a preacher, and besides, how could anything untoward take place within holy wedlock?
It’s no surprise that when she sings along with the children’s Nativity play at the end, she stands in as the Virgin Mary. No amount of cleavage-flashing on the cover of Premiere magazine can taint her angelic image now. The whole film could be seen as a damage-limitation exercise on the part of a star whose own marriage has been tainted by shady rumour.
But, sugar-coated and mendacious as it is, I have a terrible feeling that there’s nothing remotely cynical about this film. Director Penny Marshall was responsible for the rousing team-spirit-and-personal- redemption exercises like A League of Their Own and Awakenings. Only a director with a genuinely pure heart would have countenanced the moment when Washington’s handshake is described as “kinda like springtime and Mom’s home-cooking rolled into one”. Only Courtney Vance comes away with any credit here, looking deeply unimpressed – like a man who’s about to quit the cloth and hit the bottle.
The Preacher’s Wife will go on circuit nationwide this Friday, February 21