Mark Reviews Movies: WHITNEY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2018

"I can't run from myself
There's nowhere to hide."
– "I Have Nothing," David Foster and Linda Thompson, as sung by Whitney Houston

Kevin Macdonald's insightful and mournful documentary Whitney makes the case that the late Whitney Houston was both the product and the victim of her environments. For over a decade, Houston was one of, if not, the most famous of pop singers, racking up a long list of hit songs, top-selling albums, and industry awards (She holds the record for being the most-awarded female act). The entertainment industry is notorious for its parasitical and often destructive nature, and Houston's career proved to be no exception. After a long addiction to narcotics, she died at the age of 48 on February 11, 2012, after drowning in the bathtub of a Beverly Hills hotel room.

As the documentary's narrative approaches Houston's death, Macdonald shows the interior of that room, now calm and quiet and empty. It's not the first time the filmmaker simply puts us in the now-empty spaces of what was Houston's life, but it's the most haunting. The rest of those shots are, too, though.

We see the mansion that she called home, and in its pristinely maintained modern design, it looks like a museum—or maybe a tomb. Her childhood home in East Orange, New Jersey, where she lived from the ages of 4 to 18, is a different story. The exterior is fading, and the windowsills are coming unfastened. At the time Houston was a child, her family looked ideal, and the house—in a city that borders Newark, the place of her birth—reflected that middle-class perfection. Now, it looks closer to the truth of what was happening.

The film almost presents itself as a mystery, although that might simply be because the interview subjects here—Houston's family, friends, and employees—are a little hesitant to open up as fully as Macdonald might want. There's a telling moment when Houston's ex-husband Bobby Brown, himself a singer of some fame back in the day, simply stops his interview cold. Macdonald raises the vital question about Houston's addiction to drugs, and Brown states plainly that he doesn't want to talk about that subject. This is supposed to be, he argues, about Houston's life. Macdonald raises the correct point: her addiction was a key part of her life and led to her death. If they can't talk about the drugs, they can't really talk about her life. That, apparently, is fine for Brown.

The film does approach the subject of Houston's addiction in pretty blunt terms, mainly because her brothers seem comfortable enough revealing that they helped her get the drugs while she was on the road. Her older brother Michael offers that he might have been responsible for Houston starting to take drugs when she was a teenager. There was no pressure on his end. He was simply her big brother, and "Nippy," as her family and friends would call her, just wanted to be a part of his life.

The tragedy of Houston's life takes on multiple dimensions in the film. There's the tragedy of an undeniably talented singer who became a wheezing, croaking shell of her former virtuosity when she attempted a comeback tour in 2010. Macdonald provides footage of one of her performances from that tour, and it's painful to watch. There's the tragedy of her physical self-destruction, appearing emaciated on a 2001 television special, which led to rumors about her health, which led to a devastating confession during a TV interview. She became a national joke, which says more about the scavenger-like cultures of entertainment and tabloid journalism than Houston herself. Nobody in her life seemed willing or able to get her the help she needed, either fearing a loss of income or being overturned by those who wanted Houston to keep going no matter what.

The deepest tragedy is a matter of family. The film is mostly divided in two. It charts Houston's professional career, offering some tremendous montages juxtaposing her music videos and performances with the pop-culture iconography and historical events within the stages of her life.

Apart from that, her family life takes up the bulk of the film. She was born to Cissy and John Houston. Her mother was a professional singer herself, although her career never came close to the success of her daughter's. Her father was a political animal—a hustler for the local machine. The pressure was there, of course, because Cissy knew her daughter was destined for greatness. Houston believed it, and there's some backstage footage of her expressing frank jealousy about the popularity of other performers, whose fame and success she deems unworthy.

On the surface, the first blow appeared to be her parents' divorce, although one wouldn't know it, given the way that the two constantly were together in Houston's public appearances and how her father later became her manager. From that point on, it seems, Houston wanted a life that revolved around family stability in a way that she never truly had.

This inevitably led to even more pressure and some significant betrayals. It helps to explain a lot, particularly her codependent marriage to Brown, but it also confounds in other ways, mainly regarding her relationship with her daughter Bobbi Kristina. A family friend reveals that she more or less raised the little girl while her mother was touring. That informs the way the young girl literally clings to Houston during a stage appearance. If Houston's life was defined by trying to reclaim a family, her own daughter appeared to feel the same way. There's a circular nature to such family tragedies, and it's especially potent here in the film's coda, when we're reminded that Bobbi Kristina died a few years after her mother under similar circumstances.

Whitney is a shattering portrait of the destruction of an artist, a celebrity, and, above all else, a human being. Macdonald never loses sight of that final element of Houston's life—that, like all of us, there were pain and trauma that only a few saw (There's a final revelation, about abuse in her childhood, that puts the entirety of her story in a new perspective). No level of fame or success could shield her—or anyone, for that matter—from that.

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