Eiff' 18 Review - Whitney (2018)

Whitney is the second on-screen look at Whitney Houston in less than a year, following Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me. This time it’s the turn of Scottish director Kevin MacDonald, who opts to frame Whitney’s meteoric rise and tragical fall with unflinching distance over intimate emotion. There is no reliance on outright feeling which is substituted for outright access to the Houston household and beyond. There are interviews with Cissy, Whitney’s mother, a plethora of family and assistants and even destructive ex-husband Bobby Brown. For those familiar with Houston’s story, Whitney offers little new to the narrative bar an incendiary revelation in the film’s finale. For those unfamiliar with the Houston myth, audiences will find a film preoccupied with the singer’s combustible demise, rather than her stratospheric success.

The story of Whitney Houston is one we all know, in some part. The unfortunate thing is, it’s not even unique to her. There are many parallels between Whitney and Asif Kapadia’s Amy, another star who fell victim to drugs. We begin with Whitney’s upbringing, one that was “idyllic” according to one family member. She was heavily involved with the local church, she was cheeky, she was in all respects, normal girl. Indeed, her parents even sent her to a Catholic girl’s school to ensure that Whitney did not become “street smart”. The Houston tribe are all on hand to detail ‘Nippy’s’ childhood with a lovely degree of misty-eyed reminiscence. Cissy is on hand to discuss her daughter’s childhood, though tellingly, she disappears from the screen afterward.

Whitney was a girl with a God-given talent and it didn’t take her family long to notice. She rapidly moved from backing her mother up to performing solo and then achieving a record deal at the age of 20. Whitney’s dizzying success is rather overlooked by MacDonald however. There a few blasé montages splicing shots of Whitney’s endless number ones with space shuttles and Ronald Reagan before it returns to Whitney’s questionable relationship with Robyn Crawford, or her denouncement for sounding “too white” and booing at the 1989 Soul Train Awards. Sadly, there’s hardly any consideration of what made Whitney so incredible in the first place.

Soon Whitney gets stuck into its real agenda: Whitney’s drug-fuelled plummet from Queen of Pop to figure of chat-show derision and eventual death. MacDonald coolly presents us with all the typical of images of her decline from disastrous interviews to terrible performances and it’s still just as horrible as it’s always been. Whitney’s nearest and dearest go over her bleak final years, mostly unable to agree on what, or who caused her death. Bobby Brown even goes as far as to claim “drugs have nothing to do with her.” Somehow, I doubt it.

With Whitney, Kevin MacDonald attempts to answer why someone with so much promise, someone so instinctively talented, someone on top of the world could crash so unbelievably quickly and brutally. His answer is revealed to the audience in the film’s final half an hour and that is that Whitney was sexually abused as a child by her cousin Dee Dee Warwick. This is explosive information that helps to piece together all of the unfortunate strands which of Whitney’s life that dreadfully came untangled. It’s not for me to speculate why Whitney acted as she did, and it’s tough for MacDonald to convincingly argue his part too, especially as he saves his film’s raison d’être for the finale, long after any discussion of Whitney’s childhood. There isn’t really enough time at the end of the piece to fully comprehend the revelation before we watch the sad procession through Newark of Whitney’s funeral.

Whitney feels very much like a documentary. It’s fact-driven and informative but also distant and a little cold at times. In his search for the answer to Whitney’s death, MacDonald avoids celebrating her brilliant life. As her family and friends descend into a ridiculous blame game and endless bickering, it can be hard to see Whitney through it all. Yet, see her we do and that’s a testament to her more than the film.