One moment in time
Kevin Macdonald’s sensitive documentary about Whitney Houston charts the pop star’s troubles and decline but also remembers to show what a sensational singer she was
The second major documentary about Whitney Houston in the space of a year, Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney feels a lot more comprehensive than fellow Brit filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s still valuable Whitney:
Canibeme? Broadening the scope of the story with some incisive historical context and a major twist that goes some way towards explaining her later problems, the film serves as both a sober and intelligent examination of the superstar singer’s sad and tragic life and a critical re-appreciation of just how gifted and technically accomplished she was.
Tracking her rise from the riot-torn streets of 1960s Newark to her death from drowning in a hotel bathtub in 2012, aged just 48, Macdonald doesn’t reinvent the music doc wheel here. But the Oscar-winning director of
One Day in September and Touching the Void does make judicious use of archival footage and talking-head interviews to dig deeper into her life and work to give us the measure of a woman who had to constantly battle the expectations of others intent on
capitalising on her talent. Macdonald sets the tone early. Intercutting a montage of Reagan-era clips built around the dayglow poppiness of her early hits with footage of racial unrest and drug addiction, he signals not just the layer-peeling intentions of the film, but Houston’s own struggle to define herself in an industry with a skewed understanding of the relationship between success and authenticity. What emerges most clearly from the film, though, is that family is at the root of both her success and her downfall. Coming from a family of singers that included Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and her own mother Cissy Houston, she was groomed for success early, but her lighter skin and poppier sound led to charges of being a sell-out, something to which her abusive marriage to Bobby Brown (who Macdonald does interview) might partly have been in reaction.
Mercifully, though, the film also gets beyond that tabloid-honed narrative to offer up a more complex exploration of the ways in which her formative years may have scarred her irreparably. Here Macdonald understands that what’s not said is sometimes as revealing as what is said. Following a late revelation about sexual abuse, it’s telling, for instance, how certain family members shut down or tear up when he sensitively probes them about her supposedly happy childhood. And Macdonald’s sensitivity is really the key to the film’s success here. Houston’s story is by no means unique, especially in the entertainment industry, but she is. Whitney never lets us forget that.
Mary Shelley conforms to an increasingly popular brand of biopic
that zeroes on a brief period in an artist’s life to show how personal circumstances shape their most famous work. In this instance, the publication of Frankenstein is the end-point of a disappointingly dreary period drama depicting the teenage author’s tumultuous relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wasn’t much older than her, but was married with children. Though there’s no denying the scandal of their subsequent union is meaty material for a movie, it’s all done as a sort of half-hearted Twilight-inspired melodrama. That would make sense given the ages of the protagonists, but there’s no wildness here and Elle Fanning’s bloodless performance as Mary feels too measured and mature, with lots of talk about intense feelings between her and Douglas Booth’s Shelley, but not much in the way of demonstrable passion or sex. Only Bel Powley, as Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who fatefully falls for superstar poet Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), has much energy about her. It’s a shame because Saudi Arabian director Haifaa al-mansour, who made the excellent Wadjda a few years back, should have been a great choice to make this. But along with screenwriter Emma Jensen, she’s turned interesting material into something dull, respectable and lifeless, which is the last thing a film about the creation of Frankenstein should be.
Houston’s story is by no means unique, especially in the entertainment industry, but she is
Starring Natalie Dormer as a blind pianist drawn into a dangerous underworld after hearing the apparent suicide of her upstairs neighbour, In Darkness has an intriguing premise that carries the film along for a while thanks to the way it utilises the limited perspective of its protagonist. Co-written by Dormer, it’s certainly better when focused on giving us a sense of her character’s world. Alas, when it starts revealing the mystery at its core amid generic action sequences and backstories involving Serbian war atrocities, it feels much less sure of itself as a movie.
Still it’s much better than Terminal, a bizarre vanity project for producer/ star Margot Robbie in which she plays a deranged contract killer engaged in a convoluted act of revenge. The title refers to the apocalyptically bleak railway setting in which the action takes place, but it sums up the slow death experience of watching Robbie, Simon Pegg and Mike Myers flail around in this dated, empty slice of post-pulp Fiction noir.
An egregious amount of product placement for a popular fast food outlet blights the otherwise serviceable Ideal Home, a low-key comedy starring Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd as a gay couple whose flamboyant lifestyle is upended by the arrival of Coogan’s estranged grandson. The enforced parenthood storyline may be a little stale, but when its leads are allowed to riff on their characters’ newfound responsibilities it generates the odd laugh. ■