Lifetime’s Aaliyah biopic proves the haters right
Aaliyah: The Princess Of R&B, Lifetime’s latest geek-show biopic, should not exist. But for a sliver of its two-hour runtime, it’s clear how a person of sound mind could conclude it should.
The
fleeting moments of competence and grace come at the tail-end of the
film’s most salacious and fraught material. Aaliyah (Alexandra Shipp) is
struggling to reassemble her sense of self after being forbidden to see
R. Kelly (Clé Bennett) and forced to annul their secret, illegal
marriage, which was sealed at a Chicagoland Sheraton when she was 15 and
he was 27. It’s hard enough to climb out of the emotional morass
created by the permanent loss of your first love—the two reportedly
never saw each other again—but Kelly was also the mastermind behind
Aaliyah’s hit debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. In Kelly,
Aaliyah lost not only a lover, but her formative musical mentor, the man
who helped her realize her dreams of becoming an R&B superstar.
Amid
the freefall, Aaliyah’s mother Diane (Rachael Crawford) gives her
daughter a much needed pep talk, reminding her she was as much an
architect of her success as was Kelly and encouraging her to believe in
her ability to forge on without him. When Aaliyah is set to work on her
sophomore album, her handlers urge her to record with any number of
R&B producers currently on a hot streak. Instead, Aaliyah opts to
work with Timbaland and Missy Elliott (Izaak Smith and Chattrisse
Dolabaille), then a pair of unknown quantities from Norfolk, Virginia
who were as terrified to work with a star on the rise as Aaliyah was by
the prospect of finding out Kelly was the magician and she was merely
the assistant. The three form an easy bond and churn out One In A Million, still considered the master stroke of Aaliyah’s too-brief career.
Had Princess spent
more time on Aaliyah’s rebuilding phase, it would make for a
sympathetic film, at least by Lifetime standards, and it would have
offered a new take on a familiar throughline. Music history is replete
with ingenues who had to outrun a svengali’s shadow, and Aaliyah’s story
is particularly triumphant now, given some women who claim they had
dalliances with Kelly as teenagers have said the experience drove them
to suicide. The limited scope would have also dialed down the
sensationalism by trimming the sick-making “courtship.”
More than that, the One In A Million
period offers the best example of Aaliyah doing what she did best. Some
of her staunchest fans would concede she wasn’t known as a vocal
powerhouse. Aaliyah was a well-rounded pop star, and she excelled at
doing what pop stars do: conceptualizing an image, a sound and a
presentation, finding the right talent to help realize the vision, then
performing the hell out of it.
But music biopics almost never
focus on a definitive period in a performer’s life. And given that
Aaliyah died in a plane crash at only 22, it’s unsurprising for director
Bradley Walsh and writer Michael Elliott (working from Christopher John
Farley’s biography) to choose to cover a much wider period, beginning
with Aaliyah’s debut on Star Search at 10 and ending days before her death.
What
is surprising is the producers’ defiant approach to making the film.
They soldiered ahead even as Aaliyah’s family objected loudly and
withheld rights to her music, leading Zendaya Coleman, the first choice
for the leading role, to back out of the project. Celebrity estates
always fiercely protect their turf, but in fairness, Aaliyah’s family
objected to the film out of concern the network known for such cinematic
flotsam as Deadly Spa might not have the most delicate touch.
Shipp’s
performance is inoffensive, but no more than that, and what little of
Aaliyah’s music makes it to the final film does so in the form of tinny
covers that do Aaliyah’s musical legacy no favors. The film spends
entirely too much time on Aaliyah’s embryonic acting career, a
consequence of working from a life story so regrettably short, there
isn’t a need for merciless editing. So many choices in Princess boggle
the mind, including the casting of Smith and Dolabaille to play Tim and
Missy, which suggests the casting agent has only seen the influential
producers in photographs viewed through a kaleidoscope smeared with
Vaseline.
It’s hard to defend Princess as anything more than a tabloid take on well-publicized statutory rape, not unlike Lifetime’s Outlaw Prophet: Warren Jeffs,
which is especially gross considering the subject matter and the
staunch objection of Aaliyah’s family. The movie may be named after her,
but its production seems more inspired by another one of its
characters, one with a tenuous grasp on the importance of consent.
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