Whitney

Synopsis: A documentary charting the meteoric rise and fall of singer Whitney Houston.

It is unfortunate for film-maker Kevin Macdonald that Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me was released last year for although his film is more detailed it really doesn’t add much to what we know about the singer’s life and given that we know its tragic ending, there is a sense that the director is straining rather ghoulishly from the outset to get to the titillating tabloid-feeding crash-and-burn material.

Using a talking heads approach that calls on the singer’s family, friends and work colleagues Macdonald dutifully covers Houston early years bringing out in particular the role of her disciplinarian mother Cissy Houston in grooming her daughter for the kind of success which she had not achieved in her own career.

Unlike Broomfield’s film Whitney is the Houston estate authorized version which perhaps explains the relatively brief attention given to the singer’s lesbian relationship with Robyn Crawford, her personal manager, whilst her sometime husband Bobby Brown also briefly speaks on camera although he refuses to discuss her drug use, which Broomfield’s film attributed largely to his influence.  Here Houston’s  brother, Michael, and half-brother, Gary Garland, cop the rap saying that Brown was a lightweight in the drug department.  There is also a quite remarkable revelation about Houston and her brother Gary being sexually abused as a child by their adult cousin Dee Dee Warwick, sister of Dionne.

In essence however the familiar story in both films is the same – a sensitive, gifted young woman destroyed by the shallow blandishments of fame and fortune as Houston racked up an unprecedented seven consecutive No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and hit supernova status with her 1992 movie debut The Bodyguard, for which her version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” remains the best-selling single by a female artist in music history. Then as her dying father tried to sue her for $100 million and her husband went from one tabloid front cover to the next she went off the rails with a drug-drenched lifestyle that left her broke and out of the game. Even sadder is the fact that her 18 year old daughter died three years later in similar circumstances. Fame? You can keep it.

If you haven’t seen Broomfield’s film Whitney is definitely worth seeing even if  it is slightly too long and doesn’t showcase Houston’s extraordinary voice quite as well. If you have, unless you are a very big fan this is probably going to be a considerable overload.

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