Forest Whitaker’s film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s popular novel Waiting to Exhale begins with a litany of anonymous voices, all women, all spending New Year’s Eve alone, away from the men that drive them crazy and break their hearts. Though the film quickly narrows its focus to four women in particular, that overture of disembodied complaints haunts the movie. It may also help to explain why Waiting to Exhale has become a mini-phenomenon, playing to packed houses across America.

For women, especially African-American women, Waiting to Exhale is a welcome rarity: a glamorous, heartfelt production that’s refreshingly free of hyped-up melodrama. No one dies, no one is shot; no one even gets hit. The movie doesn’t resort to sensationalism or violence; it lets women’s voices be heard, clearly. When all is said and done, though, Waiting to Exhale is just too slight—it’s more a cultural event than good moviemaking.

Waiting to Exhale traces the romantic blues of four black women: Savannah (Whitney Houston), an affluent television producer; Bernadine (Angela Bassett), a supportive housewife jilted by her rich husband; Gloria (Loretta Devine), a single mother with her own hairdressing salon; and Robin (Lela Rochon), a boy-crazy insurance executive. These women dwell in the same world as most middle-class black women—a world where man trouble is a more pressing concern than race relations or drug-ridden neighborhoods.

The film is lushly photographed, with lighting that highlights dark skin, and the cast features many of our cinema’s finest black actors, including Wesley Snipes, Dennis Haysbert, Giancarlo Esposito, Mykelti Williamson and Gregory Hines. And the vignettes of good friends and bad dates offer several funny, moving moments. But in its attempt to capture the general travails of these women, the movie lapses into sketchiness. For all their talk about self-determination and individuality, the four lead characters never develop much beyond our initial impressions—we never find out where they’re from, how they met, how long they’ve known each other, or even why they’re friends. Their jobs are barely considered, and there’s not enough about their Phoenix community. The film falls into a lulling and repetitive pattern as men enter the scene, do something jerky, and get dismissed with a big speech.

To help adapt her novel, Terry McMillan enlisted the aid of screenwriter Ronald Bass (The Joy Luck Club), who brings to the movie his gift for weaving together disparate narratives. In the bargain, though, Bass also indulges his weakness for punching up scenes through overwrought emotional payoffs. The plot may be low-key, but the dialogue is not: Bass awkwardly tries to convert the novel’s interior monologues into exterior grandstanding, and the results reduce the characters to strident mouthpieces. This is particularly hard on Angela Bassett, who has a tendency to resort to deep-throated warbling when she wants to evoke distress; she’s a sharp, engaging actress, but sadness only carries her so far.

The other problem with Bass’ treatment is that it rather simplistically renders all the heroines’ actions as inherently heroic, even when there are interesting moral contradictions afoot. Bernadine flies into a justifiable blind rage when her husband cuckolds her, yet later in the movie she either sleeps with or entertains the notion of sleeping with a married man. Houston’s Savannah also has a lengthy affair with someone else’s husband—an ironic betrayal of sisterhood that, through Bass’ pen and Whitaker’s lens, is presented without comment.

The film ends on yet another New Year’s Eve, as all the lead actresses gather around a bonfire to celebrate friendship. The scene is curiously unmoving, however: We don’t know enough specific facts about these women to do any more than project onto them what we imagine they might be feeling—which is just what I suspect women are doing in theaters all over the country. They don’t identify with the characters, they become the characters. Robin, Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine—these aren’t everywomen, they’re anywomen. What lingers about Waiting to Exhale is that buzz of voices that opens the film—so unfortunately indistinguishable from the voices to come.—Noel Murray

Stone Soup

I come not to praise but to bury Nixon, Oliver Stone’s mesmerizingly awful three-hour deconstruction of the life and bitter fortunes of our most reviled president. I had seen the movie over the Christmas holidays, in a theater illuminated by the flickering lights of people checking their watches. After watching audience members stagger from the theater like cave-in survivors, stretching, blinking and feeling for the light, I assumed that after a few weeks the movie, like the man himself, would not be around to kick anymore.

How wrong I was. Instead, Nixon has been placed on life support by the nation’s editorial columnists, who appear shocked—shocked!—that a Hollywood depiction of history might take some liberties with the record. The argument has been taken up most recently by the Tennessean, which ran both a lengthy John Seigenthaler assault upon the movie’s veracity and a rebuttal by guest columnist Marcia Kennard. Seigenthaler detailed Stone’s many questionable assertions, including the suggestion that Nixon had knowledge of a CIA plot to assassinate Castro, and concluded that the movie obscured rather than clarified history. Kennard countered that Stone’s fictional additions helped to humanize a man she had once regarded as a one-dimensional monster.

In typical fashion, Stone has skillfully muddled the issue, claiming on one hand that his film takes the same artistic liberties as Shakespeare’s historical plays, and with the other issuing an annotated screenplay filled with references to books, official documents and interviews that supposedly support his account. If anything, the footnotes only undermine his claims of authenticity: It is one thing to refer on the page to the late J. Edgar Hoover’s “alleged homosexuality,” and quite another to depict the man lounging around in a fluffy robe sucking orange slices off the lips of his Hispanic houseboy. Of course, Hoover, like Nixon, is dead, and historical license is so much easier when the licensers themselves are history.

The truth is that we wouldn’t need Stone’s annotations if we (or he) knew what kind of movie he was making. If a work’s tone is satirical, we expect a certain amount of hyperbole and exaggeration. In Robert Coover’s disturbing comic novel The Public Burning—published, incidentally, in Nixon’s lifetime—Nixon has sex with Ethel Rosenberg in her cell. Coover doesn’t provide any historical basis for the incident, and he doesn’t need to: The tone of his entire novel, at once surreal and sardonic, tells us that he is using historical events and characters strictly in a figurative sense. But Coover is not using fictitious events to help us understand Nixon; he’s using them to make larger observations about political opportunism and the perversion of democracy.

Stone, on the other hand, uses imaginary events and characters to give insight into the man himself—a tactic that rarely works elsewhere and doesn’t work here. He jumbles straightforward, sentimental recreations of Nixon’s childhood with specious historical speculation (a sinister chorus of shadowy Texas oil men backing Nixon) and bizarre fantasy material (Nixon seeing his mother’s ghost in the White House, a scene that’s only a dwarf shy of Twin Peaks’ second-season lunacy). Given the real events of Nixon’s life, Stone shouldn’t have to invent incidents that show his greatness or ignobility. Yet he both frames and acquits Nixon with the trumped-up evidence of his staging. Even if Nixon did meet with shady Texas pols, I doubt that they glowered menacingly in a dark room, lit like gargoyles, while they dropped ominous hints about the Kennedy assassination.

Even without the historical sleight-of-hand, though, Nixon would be a terrible movie. Not inaptly, Stone sees Nixon as equal parts Charles Foster Kane, Dr. Strangelove and Willy Loman. His fatal mistake is to try to combine the theatricality of Citizen Kane, the poker-faced nightmare comedy of Dr. Strangelove, and the tragic realism of Death of a Salesman. The horror-movie camera angles and in-your-face editing don’t jibe with the painstaking newsreel recreations and the flat docudrama presentation of Nixon’s cabinet.

The idea of creating a multimedia collage of a figure so endlessly debated has merit: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg tried a similar technique in Our Hitler. Ever since The Doors, however, Stone has applied the same MTV-damaged style—a blizzard of film stocks, quick cuts, and shaky-cam montages—to every subject, and it doesn’t seem appropriate for the story of Richard Nixon, whose very discomfort before the cameras made him a perpetual casualty of television. Combine this editorial barrage with a heap of overused stock footage and Stone’s own hilariously literal-minded symbolism—Koyaanisqatsi-style time-lapse footage for the winds of change sweeping America, the fires of hell superimposed over Nixon as he feels the heat from Watergate—and you have some of the nuttiest montages since Ed Wood spliced together buffalo stampedes and atomic warfare in Glen or Glenda?

The acting ranges from terrific—James Woods’ live-wire H.R. Haldeman, Joan Allen as a steely Pat Nixon—to the quality of a TV miniseries, and it doesn’t help to have familiar faces in virtually every role. (Hell, J.R. Ewing himself even turns up leading the Texas oil contingent.) And while Anthony Hopkins occasionally captures a gesture or a glimmer of Nixon’s ferocious drive, he doesn’t convey the force of personality or intellect that commanded such loyalty and fear among his associates. While not placing him in a fake nose and Nixon makeup was a bold idea, it turns Nixon into even more of an enigma: When Hopkins is pasted into the Kennedy debates, he might as well be Forrest Gump.

All I know is that, at the end of Nixon, when the real Richard Nixon appeared briefly onscreen, I felt like I knew and understood less about him than I did going in. It takes some kind of genius to take a man as vivid as Richard Nixon and transform him, after only three hours, into an unrecognizable abstraction. Perhaps, one might argue, that simply mirrors the function of history. Perhaps. But I expect more from art.—Jim Ridley

Pretty Vacant

The new anthology film Four Rooms reportedly began as sort of a lark, conceived over drinks a few years ago at the Sundance Film Festival by four talented young independent filmmakers, Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Their plan was to make a group movie consisting of four short films set in the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, thereby presenting Hollywood’s next wave of artistes as a united front, poised to conquer.

But that was before Tarantino captured popular imagination with Pulp Fiction, Rodriguez leapt into the mainstream with Desperado, and projects by Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging) and Rockwell (In the Soup) either went unmade or were made and quickly forgotten. By the time the foursome reunited to build their Four Rooms, the Declaration of Principles had evolved into a sort of tontine, entered into with conflicting feelings of resentment and dread. The resultant movie is depressingly listless, more a memo than a document. If anybody involved gave a damn about what they were making, their commitment escapes the viewer.

The film’s four “stories” are little more than premises. Allison Anders ushers Madonna, Ione Skye, Lili Taylor, Valeria Golina and other interesting actresses into her room for a go-nowhere film about a coven of witches and their quest for sperm. Alexandre Rockwell does even less in his film, about a man who has tied up his wife in their hotel room. Robert Rodriguez’s film about a gangster’s mischievous kids is tightly edited and imaginatively shot (and is blessed with the presence of Antonio Banderas and two cute children), but it builds to a pointlessly gruesome climax. The final entry, Tarantino’s often hilarious reimagining of an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, is hampered by rambling ad-libs and a charisma-free lead performance by Tarantino himself.

All four films feature Tim Roth as the hotel’s hapless bellboy, in an embarrassingly over-the-top riff on Jerry Lewis. The Lewis rip, like the all-star cast and the cocktail lounge music that plays incessantly on the soundtrack, are the filmmakers’ collective attempt to buy or steal hipness rather than create it from whole cloth. Each of the films is underimagined, and it’s clear the creators are hoping that their hyped-up “genius” will transform their own weak material; when that fails, they hope the style alone will elevate them. They are woefully mistaken.

To be fair to Anders and Rockwell, their films have been cut almost in half (following a disastrous screening at the Toronto Film Festival that had the audience openly booing during the first hour). It’s hard to imagine, however, how length would improve them—even abbreviated, both are excruciating. Fans of Rodriguez and Tarantino might glean something worthwhile from their segments of Four Rooms, but it’s unwise to put much stock in that kind of truffle-sniffing. Our sketchbook culture already gets overly excited about Beatles anthologies and unfinished novels; the last thing we need is to subject ourselves to intentionally loose works by underachieving artists.

It’s cause for concern when cinema’s brightest hopes, given free reign, can’t come up with anything brighter than sick jokes and hapless posing. Four Rooms began as a lark and ends in tears.—Noel Murray