Whitney
Cert: 15A; Now showing When a great talent meets an untimely and unnecessary end, there is a tendency to focus on their death. It is morbidly fascinating how someone with so much can be intent on self-destruction.
Kevin Macdonald’s documentary Whitney is the second in a year to look at Whitney Houston’s demons and while it reaches many of the same conclusions as Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me? it offers one more shocking explanation for her struggles.
Macdonald has some great films to his name (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) and this work is effective if occasionally prurient, such as the focus on the bathtub where she died. Composed of interviews with friends and family as well as archive footage of the singer’s childhood, TV appearances and performances, it chronicles her talent, her rise to fame, her rejection by the black community, her marriage to Bobby Brown, her drug use and her sexuality.
Although her family sanctioned the film, Macdonald does not absolve them from blame, her ambitious mother Cissy groomed Whitney for a career, but not necessarily life, her father was a controlling philanderer and her brothers admit they introduced her to drugs.
But the film’s new information comes towards the end. Since her death there can be no definitive explanation for her spiral but the film offers compelling insights into a combination of factors that fed Houston’s demons.