Sparkle (Akil Production Company, Stage 6 Films, Sony Entertainment Company, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie last night, the 2012 remake of Sparkle, a 1976 original written by Joel Schumacher and Howard Rosenman and directed by Sam O’Steen (best known as a film editor) about three sisters who form a singing group in 1950’s Harlem despite the opposition of their fiercely religious mother. The original starred Irene Cara as Sparkle and Lonette McKee as her sister, Sister (that’s really her name!), and it was apparently a favorite of singer Whitney Houston, who bought the remake rights and tried to set it up for over a decade. Her original try would have cast her as the mother and R&B singer Aaliyah as Sparkle, but Aaliyah’s death in a plane crash in 2001 put an end to that. Houston was able to make Sparkle at long last in 2012, just before her own death, with a new screenplay by Mara Brock Akil that moved the story from 1950’s New York to 1960’s Detroit, with Mara’s husband Salim Akil directing. The story features three sisters being raised by a ferociously protective mother who wants them to sing, if at all, only in church – can you say The Jazz Singer? – named “Emma Anderson” and played by Whitney Houston with surprising power and authority as an actress. (I say “surprising” because she was so terrible in The Bodyguard, though in fairness that film’s disconnected script would have been a challenge to just about anyone – including the very experienced singer-actress for whom it was originally written, Barbra Streisand.)

The three sisters are Sparkle (Jordin Sparks), Sister (Carmen Ejogo) and Dolores (Tika Sumpter), and Sparkle and Sister have aspirations for secular showbiz while Dolores wants to keep her head down, stay in college and ultimately go to medical school. Emma’s overprotectiveness is explained by her backstory – as a teenager she ran away to New York with her own dreams of music superstardom, onlyi to come back a failure and an alcoholic with a baby she was going to have to raise alone because she was the product of a one-night stand. (This explains how Sparkle came to exist but it leaves us wondering where her two sisters came from; there’s no explanation of what sort of relationship Emma had with their father, and we’re not even sure Sister and Dolores had the same biological dad.) The film opens at a talent contest which Sister and Sparkle have sneaked out of the house to attend; their plan is that Sister will be the performer and Sparkle will write her songs but stay in the background. We see Sister carefully cut her dress open and unbutton her top so she’ll look sexier on stage as she croons Sparkle’s composition. They attract attention from men with various desires for them: Stix (Derek Luke), who wants to manage them (and to recruit Dolores so they can be a Supremes-style trio); Satin (Mike Epps), a Black comedian who makes dreadfully unfunny and racially deprecating jokes for white audiences; and Levison (Omari Hardwick), nicknamed “Levi,” who wants to date Sparkle and seems sincerely in love with her even though he’s broke – their “date” consists of taking a bus during a rainstorm and eating at a diner called “Coney island.” (Was that a leftover from the New York setting of the original film they were remaking?)

The sisters – still having to sneak out behind their mother’s back – manage to get an invitation to another talent contest, this one a private “showcase” gig, and they attract the attention of a scout from Columbia Records. Only by the time of the audition Sister has married Satin and he’s regularly beating her up, and when he’s not doing that he’s introducing her to cocaine and getting her hooked on drugs – the parallel to the real Whitney Houston, who made it to superstardom and then blew it on a drug habit and an absolutely wretched choice of man, is inescapable. Dolores bails on the group and resumes her aspirations to go to medical school and train to be a doctor – her rejection of showbiz is symbolized by her cutting off her long, straight hair and getting a severely short Afro that makes her look like a professional Black woman instead of a sex object – after the film’s big climax, in which Sparkle and Dolores are at the home of Satin and Sister (represented by such a weird set that Charles looked like they bought a motel and converted it into a single living space for themselves). Satin is beating on Sister, and when Sparkle tries to intervene he punches her out, too – and Dolores sneaks up behind them and saves Sparkle’s life by grabbing a fireplace poker, hitting Satin with it and killing him. Rather than risk her sisters ruining their potential careers on her behalf, Sister sends them away and tells them to say they were never there so Sister will take the legal blame for Satin’s murder on her own – and she ends up in prison serving a sentence for manslaughter.

At Satin’s funeral Emma sings a marvelously intense gospel version of the hymn “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” in what was almost certainly Whitney Houston’s last recorded performance – and while her voice was audibly more ragged than it had been in her heyday (people who heard her last two albums said the drugs had clearly taken their toll on that once shimmeringly beautiful voice; the most perfectly pure pop voices I’ve ever heard were Houston’s and Karen Carpenter’s, and they both met sad ends), she sings with surprising intensity. If this is the song she went out on, it was a worthy finale. Eventually Sparkle gets a showcase gig on her own and wins a Columbia Records contract and a shot at superstardom with an intriguing act in which she starts out on plano (sort of like Alicia Keys or Norah Jones), until we hear a full orchestra, three backup singers (blessedly not related to her) and, as the back curtain rises, a full gospel choir. She opens with a song called “One Wing” dedicated to her sister, Sister, and then the film includes two more performances by Jordin Sparks as Sparkle called “Love Wins” and “Celebrate.” These songs showcase Sparks’ voice far better than the rather limp material she got previously, but in a movie that was already this star-crossed by fate (the death of Aaliyah canceling the first attempt and Houston’s own death hanging over the film – the credits include a memorial to her, indicating that she finished her work on the film but died shortly afterwards), the writer of those last three big songs adds another bit of creepiness to the project: R. Kelly.

Sparkle is a haunting film that gets better as it goes along, though one flaw is that it showcases so much great music of the period – including soul classics like Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” and Aretha Franklin’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Night Life” (one of those early songs Nelson wrote and gave to other performers to establish himself) representing a concert in which the sisters are Aretha’s opening act, and clips from TV shows of the period by white performers (like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin»’ and Cream’s “Susnshine of Your Love,” representing shows the sisters watch on TV – that the new songs written for the sisters sound decidedly limp by comparison. Certainly making the parent (the Warner Oland character) not only a woman but one who nearly destroyed herself pursuing a career in secular music instead of doing God’s work is an intriguing variation on the Jazz Singer formula, and this version of Sparkle is good enough it makes me want to seek out the 1976 original as well (one imdb.com reviewer said s/he wasn’t looking forward to this film because they were such a fan of the original, but were surprised at how good this one was), which got mentioned in some of the reviews of the film Dreamgirls (also a roman à clef loosely based on the career of the Supremes, a great movie even with its disappointingly sentimental ending) as a precursor.