Houston, you have a problem
Nick Broomfield’s doom-laden documentary about Whitney Houston is revealing and harrowing in equal measure
It’s impossible to watch Whitney: “Can I Be Me”, the new music documentary from acclaimed director Nick Broomfield and
Rudi Dolezal, who provided candid behind-the-scenes footage from her 1999 My Love is Your Love world tour, and not think about another film about a doomed female musical talent who was nurtured, manipulated, abused and abandoned to her fate while the world watched: Asif Kapadia’s
Amy (2015). (It’s also impossible not to ponder if the box office success of the latter begat the former, though such a meta-level of quasi-exploitation is too much to contemplate, so let’s try and assume not.)
It would be fairly crass to compare Winehouse and Houston’s demise, given that they both ended up the same way, and a tragic death is a tragic death. But what Broomfield’s documentary reveals with uncustomary restraint (Broomfield’s own presence is kept to two off-camera questions, and there’s not a bobbing boom mic in sight), is that in Houston’s story, with its American levels of fame and money, the stakes were much, much higher. Not only did Houston have a responsibility to herself and her talent, revealed in early footage of her singing in her domineering mother’s gospel choir, she was also tasked with conquering white American pop without turning her back on her black American musical roots: something she didn’t always manage to do.
Added to that was a deep-rooted drug habit that started in her youth in the New Jersey ’hood, and a complicated private life: both a hinted-at love affair with her closest female friend, and her Machiavellian husband Bobby Brown, who makes Winehouse’s “Blakey” look like Spongebob. Most devastatingly of all, she also had a daughter.
Yes, you’ll be reminded, or even convinced for the first time, of Houston’s extraordinary talent, but as the narrative starts its inevitable downward trajectory, the tragedy is almost too much to bear. — Whitney: “Can I Be Me” is out in cinemas on 16 June