An oddly unmoving memorial
Whitney Cert TBC, 120 min ★★★★★ Dir Kevin Macdonald
The second and more “official” feature documentary about the steep, upsetting parabola of Whitney Houston’s life, Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney comes about a year after Whitney: Can I Be Me,
Nick Broomfield’s exploration of her pressurised career and drug-assisted burnout. The latter lacked either the endorsement or involvement of the Houston family, above all her mother, Cissy, presented there as the architect and oppressive controller of her fame.
This one has the Houston clan’s blessing, which cuts two ways. On the plus side, we get a much more intimate sense of Houston’s upbringing, and one late-arriving bombshell as Macdonald looks to her childhood – described reflexively as “idyllic”, but marked by a secret history of abuse – to contextualise why addiction took hold.
The danger is what protective agendas might colour the exercise. It’s curious that Cissy appears only at the very start, interviewed briefly in the very church where her daughter’s funeral took place. This doesn’t help the cause in terms of allaying doubts: it feels like Macdonald is taking care to placate Cissy and give her a degree of authorship. Whitney’s ex-husband, Bobby Brown, is a star contributor on paper, but he clams up totally when Macdonald tries to steer the discussion to drugs, with the revealingly sinister: “That’s not what this film is about.”
Macdonald shows he’s under no obligation to agree, though, and there’s clearly an inner circle of trust he thinks can be fruitfully accessed. Sometimes he’s right. Other interviewees fill in the blanks, and there’s a particularly grim revelation. One of Whitney’s brothers, Gary Garland, says he was molested as a child by a female relative. Whitney’s aunt, Mary Jones – who found her body in the Beverly Hilton hotel – then says that Whitney told her “Mary, I was too. It was a woman”, and also names the abuser: Whitney and Gary’s cousin, Deedee Warwick (sister of Dionne). This feels all the more convincing coming from such a sympathetic source, and gives the film a news value otherwise lacking.
There’s no single explanation for how a career as dazzling as Houston’s was from about 1985 to 1999 could implode so quickly and distressingly over the next decade. However beyond her own control it was, the packaging of Houston’s talents (was she to be “fad music” or “legacy music”?) didn’t halt her ascent to megastar status with The Bodyguard in 1992, providing her with a blockbuster and the best-selling single by a woman in music history.
Whitney’s sexuality is still a matter of thorny dispute, not least because of Cissy’s disapproval – absent here – of her relationship with creative director and sometime lover Robyn Crawford. It’s acknowledged that the family’s homophobia was a troubling factor, and even – according to Jones – that the aforementioned childhood abuse could have complicated Houston’s sexual preferences in adulthood, explaining the forced normativity of her marriage.
Public mockery of Houston’s declining health, after a disastrous Diane Sawyer interview in 2002, was brutal and debilitating, too. The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial but, as with Asif Kapadia’s documentary on Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of judgment that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.
Opens in the UK in June