Whitney

I was not disappointed. An in depth look at Whitney's life through the people who knew her best. Beautifully put together.

This documentary chronicles the life with ups and downs of the most cherished raw singer in the history music. Whitney (2018), exposes viewers to life growing up, musical training, drug addition, and family history. Secrets, marriage struggles, being a mother in the industry, and family turmoil are all highlighted in this very raw documentary. It is Whitney Houston like we've never seen it before. If you thought you knew everything about the musical legend, this a must see.

I wasn't a huge fan of Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal's Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017). The film was built on the foundation of never-before-seen backstage footage from Houston's World Tour 1999, but I felt the narrative was poorly constructed, jumping from her divorce from Bobby Brown in 2007 to her death in 2012 with very little detail on what happened in those five years. This had the effect of making the last part of the documentary feel rushed and incomplete. I went into it not knowing a huge amount about Whitney Houston (apart from the obvious bits and pieces that everyone knows), and I came out still not knowing a huge amount about her.

Written and directed by Kevin Macdonald, Whitney covers almost identical terrain as Broomfield and Dolezal, with many of the same interviewees appearing in both films, and much of the same factual information presenting itself (Houston tried drugs long before becoming a celebrity; she was criticised as "acting white" and selling out her culture by many black people, and was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards (where her single "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" was nominated for Best R&B/Urban Contemporary Single - Female"); she was hounded with questions regarding her sexuality for much of her life, etc). One hugely important absence from both films, of course, is Robyn Crawford, Whitney's one time best friend, road manager, and probable lover, who was pretty much the only person in Houston's life who seemed to tell her what was really what, as opposed to what she wanted to hear, and have Houston's best interests at heart. Apart from a beautiful obituary for Esquire (on whose editorial staff Crawford's wife works), Crawford has maintained a dignified silence since Houston died, and neither Broomfield and Dolezal nor Macdonald were able to persuade her to speak on camera. This leaves a sizeable lacuna in the narratives of both films, as it is fairly unlikely anyone will really get to the core of who Houston was until (or indeed if) Crawford decides to tell her own story. As a side note, one interesting figure who didn't appear in Can I Be Me, but who does unexpectedly pop up in Whitney is Clive Davis, president of Arista Records, and the man who signed Houston to her first record deal.

For all their similarities, however, I found Macdonald's film superior to Can I Be Me. Whitney has two major, and interconnected, advantages over the earlier film. Can I Be Me is more concerned with facts, and probably covers more "Did you know" moments, such as the idea to open "I Will Always Love You" capella style was actually Kevin Costner's. However, having said that, Macdonald does manage to squeeze in a couple of not especially well known moments of his own; for example, Houston's haunting rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl (where she had her bandleader and arranger Rickey Minor take the radical step of altering the time signature from a 3/4 to a 4/4) was completely unrehearsed, and the revelations regarding Dee Dee Warwick are shocking to say the least. However, what Macdonald does much better than Broomfield and Dolezal is that, on several occasions, he takes time out from the narrative to simply let the audience hear her sing. Probably because of this, his film is considerably more emotive. I was very moved by it on a couple of occasions; I don't remember being moved by Can I Be Me at all. One scene in particular I found very upsetting recalls that horrific scene in Amy (la chica detrás del nombre) (2015) where Amy Winehouse is performing in Serbia a month before she died. In Whitney, it's footage from her Nothing But Love World Tour 2010, as she tries and completely fails to sing "I Will Always Love You" in Newcastle. The crowd is respectful enough, but given that so much of the documentary is simply about her voice, seeing her like this is very sad, as with her hoarse voice, she can barely stay in tune, let alone hit the high notes, sounding more like someone doing a bad karaoke rendition than one of the greatest singers of all time.

Another very well handled part of the documentary's narrative is its coverage of what could be termed "mainstream media complicity" in her suffering. Look, Whitney Houston was a drug addict and a terrible mother, who was indirectly responsible for Bobbi Kristina Brown's death, insofar as she gave her child no stability, and introduced her to a world of substance abuse. Nobody is arguing anything different. But she was also a person, suffering deeply, in public, and very few people did, or even tried to do, anything to help her. The film presents a 2002 sketch from Saturday Night Live (1975) with Maya Rudolph as Whitney, in which she addresses the infamous Diane Sawyer "crack is whack" interview, and a scene from a 2005 episode of Padre Made in USA (2005), in which an emaciated Whitney "sings for crack" in the Smith living-room. These clips were probably funny at the time, but aren't especially funny now, and they serve to highlight one of the most bizarre paradoxes of our celebrity obsessed society; we love to build people up and up and up, but, at some arbitrary point in time, we decide they've become too popular, too successful, too talented, so we do anything to pull them down, and when something goes wrong in their lives, really catastrophically wrong, our response as a society is not empathy, kindness, or understanding, but scorn, derision, and sarcasm. What a strange world we've made.

I was lucky enough to see this as part of preview screening at the Brixton Ritzy, bookended by incredible performances from the London Community Gospel Choir. It was emotionally exhausting, a whole range from euphoria at her stratospheric rise to distress at Whitney's destructive fall and personal tragedy. The film is an education in the music industry, media reaction and family drama. Stark and shocking in places with well chosen news footage framing her life in the context of the world she lived in at the time.

I knew very little Whitney prior to watching this, and I have watched quite a few documentaries on Musicians, some better than others. The best part of this documentary are the interviews with her friends and family, and the fact that it does not flinched away from what Whitney became, it does not sugar coat things, and this was refreshing. I felt it allowed the interviewees to give a fairly unfiltered perspective, and they confirmed the little bits I had heard about Whitney. Particularly when her friends and family confirm what Bobby Brown claims in the first chapter of his biography, that Whitney was really the leader in the their relationship when came to drugs. Her family claims Bobby was quite the lightweight when it comes to drugs. Granted, Bobby had many other problems and was a jerk and philanderer, and that isn't sugar coated either. I also gained some respect for Bobby as he refused to go into the details of the drug usage, now I'm sure part of that was because he doesn't want to say what he did, regardless of it being his or Whitney's influence, and I can't say I blame him, who wants to talk about that when a microscope has been on you most of your life?

This actually turned out to be a far more tragic story than I anticipate, but I won't go into details as to why, it would ruin the surprises, all though sadly, they are bad surprises, and will make you very sad. One of the most disgusting things I didn't know, which would be common knowledge to most people over 35 I suppose, is that Whitney was a victim of racism at the hands of Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton is not a good human being, and he attacked Whitney viciously for not being "black enough", when all she was doing was making the music she wanted to irrespective of color, which is how it should be. It is a sick person that would harass and start protest to the point that it causes a backlash at an awards show, it is highly disturbing, not the most disturbing thing here, but it is very upsetting to see racism from one black person to another over styles of music. Sadly this typical of rhetoric(rooted in critical theory) has not become uncommon, but more common and downright excepted in many places, especially on college campuses. In fact, Al Sharpton has recently criticized some of this stuff recently, when Al Sharpton is criticizing you for being extreme, something is really really wrong.

On the whole, I found it inspiring to watch her singing, when she was in her prime, but it became even more depressing, seeing what a great vocalist she was as a teen and 20-something year old. This is someone who could sing with a huge range without much, and then plummeting to a place where should couldn't even stay on pitch very well, and this is, in my opinion, the saddest thing. Her voice was destroyed because of her pain in her life, because of her chosen coping mechanism; drugs. That is common knowledge, but it is pretty depressing watching this over the course of a two hour film, and it made me really appreciate her, knowing the pain she suffered. I am certain this is what made her not just a great technical vocalist, but one that used emotion and feeling with equal ability; this is what made her so popular.

A movie worth watching if you have interest in popular music or music history, you don't have to be a fan of Whitney, I wasn't, but I think you might just come out a fan after learning more about her.