IN death, as in life, Whitney Houston has not wanted for attention. Kevin Macdonald is the singer’s latest portraitist, his documentary following the biopic Whitney (2015) and Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017). One might wonder what else can be said about such a well-charted life cut short so cruelly at 48.
Glasgow-born Macdonald answers this with a film that soars to a high note and holds it. Such is its scope, access, and the revelation at its heart, his Whitney has good claim to be the definitive account of Houston’s spectacular rise and fall. Here is a bells and whistles pop morality tale, but here, too, is a quietly moving, thoughtfully told story of a woman who had everything except the ability to be at peace with herself.
Macdonald begins in a predictable enough way with the opening notes of a Houston song, only to cut away abruptly to Ronald Reagan praising “America’s Whitney” and to race riots in late 1960s Newark, where she grew up. It is the first of many occasions when he puts forward different aspects of Houston and leaves the viewer to make their mind up about which one best represents her. Houston, it is clear, was a lot of things to many people at different points in her life.
We hear about those different versions from interviews with most of those closest to her. Macdonald had the family’s cooperation in making the film, which gave him unprecedented access to the main protagonists, among them Cissy, Houston's mother, Bobby Brown, her ex-husband, and close aides.
This proximity might have made for a hagiography, but Macdonald’s film is no such thing. Houston’s problems, her drug addiction chief among them, are not tiptoed around. There is unflattering footage of her high. He asks the right questions, not least about where the money went. When he does not get answers, as in the interview with Brown, this tells its own tale. Similarly, the clipped way family members talk, or don’t talk, about Houston’s lifelong friend, Robyn Crawford, speaks volumes.
In Macdonald's account of Houston’s beginnings we hear about a happy child whom everybody loved, but we also learn she and her siblings were passed from pillar to post when their mother, a backing singer, was on the road. We hear, too, about the bullying and the bad dreams. All this with the earthquake of stardom still to come.
Macdonald spends too much time on the tabloid years before getting back to what he does best, looking for the real story behind the starry facade. He duly gets it, but he makes no fuss, as if we all knew this point was coming.
Besides bringing some sense to what happened in those later years, Macdonald restores Houston’s reputation as a artist. She was not everyone’s choice of listening. The film features the story of the court case in England where one neighbour was jailed for causing “psychological torture” to another for playing “I Will Always Love You” day and night. Houston was not all about the power ballads though, as Macdonald shows. Like Sinatra, she could be a genius at interpretation, as in her deeply moving version of The Star Spangled Banner.
The rest of her life, including the birth of her daughter, the move into films (Kevin Costner, her co-star in The Bodyguard, pays a touching tribute), her standing with black America (once booed, finally adored) are given their place. Then comes time to chart the decline, covered mercilessly in the press. Some of the jokes at her expense take the breath away with their cruelty. Would Houston be met with more compassion today?
One would like to think so, but it’s doubtful. Nor can we say whether Houston might have made it back from the last crisis, or if she was always destined to end up the subject of a tear-strewn documentary. By the end of this two hour film one realises the only thing known for certain about Houston is that no-one truly knew her at all.
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