Most of "Glitter" isn't gold
"Glitter" is not "The Mariah Carey Story", but it's tempting to try to read it that way. The movie is based not on Carey's life but on a kind of mirror image, in which she has a black mother and a white father instead of the other way around, and is taken under the wing of a club deejay instead of a record executive. Her character, named Billie Frank (after the two great vocalists?), makes all the usual stops on the rags-to-riches trail, but the movie rushes past them.
We're in the strange position of knowing everything that's going to happen and wishing it would take longer. Young Billie (Isabel Gomes) is first seen in a smoky dive, invited up on stage to join her mother, Lillian (Valarie Pettiford), in a duet. Soon after, Lillian falls asleep while smoking and burns the house down, and we are left to conclude she is a junkie, although the movie is so reticent it only confirms this years later, with a report that Lillian is now clean and sober.
Billie is shipped off to an orphanage, where she makes instant friends (a black, a white and a Puerto Rican), identifies herself as "mixed" and - well, that's it for the orphanage. Fast-forward to grown-up Billie, now played by Carey, who is a backup singer behind the untalented protege of a would-be record producer (Terrence Howard). She ghosts the other singer's voice and is spotted by a deejay named Dice (Max Beesley), who buys her contract from the would-be producer for $100,000, but unwisely neglects to make the payment.
Dice guides her into a record contract, a hit single, and so on, before undergoing a sudden, unexplained personality change. He seems to become Mr. Hyde purely as a plot device. The closing several scenes of the movie are a blinding whirl of developments, jammed so close together that there's barely time for Billie to get tragic news before she rushes onto the stage of Madison Square Garden and then into the arms of her long-lost mother.
You can see, here and there, what the movie was aiming at. It makes some sly digs at self-important music video directors, has an affectionate cameo by Ann Magnuson as a hyper publicist, and does a good job of showing how a young talent attracts friends, enemies, leeches and hangers-on. Always steadfast are Billie's two backup singers, Louise (Da Brat) and Roxanne (Tia Texada), who seem to spend 24 hours a day in their apartment so they are always available to take her calls, see her on TV, listen to her song on the radio and take her in when she needs a home. Those girls should get out more.
Carey sings a lot, well, in footage that would be at home in a concert video. Her acting ranges from dutiful flirtatiousness to intense sincerity; she never really lets go. The title "Glitter" is perhaps intended to evoke "Sparkle" (1976), which was grittier, livelier and more convincing. The name "Billie" evokes "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972), which was miles better. And for a biopic of a singer's hard road to the top, the standard is "What's Love Got To Do With It" (1993), where Angela Bassett took the seemingly impossible assignment of playing Tina Turner and triumphed.
One problem with "Glitter" is that it doesn't step up and offer itself as Mariah Carey's real story, and yet is so afraid of being taken that way that it goes easy on the details anyway. Was being a mixed-race child as much of a nonissue in Carey's childhood as it is in this movie? Billie searches for her birth mother, and yet there's a scene so confusingly handled that we're not sure if she sees her on the street one night or not.
We're given a triumphant concert in Madison Square Garden, but it's unlikely she could even sing under the circumstances shown. And the film is lacking above all in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank. (The Register-Guard)
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