Whit­ney: Can I Be Me

Whit­ney Houston’s face has a beau­ty that radi­ates seren­i­ty. She is serene in tele­vi­sion inter­views; she is serene when cam­eras pur­sue her at par­ties; she is serene when seen from afar social­is­ing with loved ones.

This image – at odds with her ghoul­ish death – is res­ur­rect­ed in Nick Broom eld and Rudi Dolezal’s respect­ful doc­u­men­tary about the late super­star singer. ​“How much has suc­cess changed you?” an off-screen inter­view­er asks Whit­ney at the peak of her world dom­i­na­tion, just after the release of 1992’s The Body­guard. She paus­es (serene­ly) then says: ​“Suc­cess doesn’t change you. Fame does.”

The fame indus­try is the under­ly­ing sub­ject of this film, its val­ues deter­min­ing Whitney’s path and its gap­ing maw always cajol­ing the singer to gen­er­ate more rich­es, faster, don’t stop. When Whitney’s star took off as a teenag­er, she brought peo­ple with her: fam­i­ly, friends, drug bud­dies. She end­ed up as a big glow­ing cog at the cen­tre of a machine that pro­vid­ed peo­ple with their lives. She was always gen­er­ous. She bought hous­es for friends. But when she need­ed to slow down, peo­ple couldn’t look past their vest­ed inter­ests, the doc says, so she retreat­ed into drugs.

Broom eld and Dolezal have the side-play­ers tell this sto­ry. That is, the make-up artists, the ses­sion musi­cians and those watch­ing in the wings. We don’t hear from any­one at the cen­tre of the entourage that trav­elled with Whit­ney, stuff­ing bag­gies up ori­fices to trans­port nar­cotics on world tours. Bob­by Brown emerges as one of the key fig­ures in shap­ing her life. He was an MC, hus­band, and father of her daugh­ter, Bob­bi Kristi­na. There’s also Robin, Whitney’s best friend and a source of solace. There were inti­ma­tions that Robin and Whit­ney were in love, but as an archive inter­view between Oprah and Whitney’s moth­er, Cis­sy, shows by exam­ple, homo­pho­bia was too rife for a les­bian rela­tion­ship to flourish.

This is not a for­mal­ly ambi­tious doc­u­men­tary styled to win awards for inno­v­a­tive sto­ry­telling. Humil­i­ty towards the sub­ject, def­er­ence to the facts, dogged reliance on stan­dard-issue doc-mak­ing mate­ri­als (talk­ing heads, archive inter­views, con­cert footage) form the basis of a chrono­log­i­cal jog through a life that began in New Jer­sey in 1963 and end­ed in the Bev­er­ly Hilton in 2012.

It is a sto­ry com­pelling for its sad­ness, yet the film­mak­ers avoid sen­sa­tion­al­ist touch-points. Unlike Asif Kapadia’s sim­i­lar­ly-styled sur­vey of Amy Wine­house, Amy, there is a focus on the woman rather than melo­dra­mat­ic hand-wring­ing, and unlike in Amy, there is evi­dence that graft has been under­tak­en to the keep the subject’s val­ues at the cen­tre. There is no lack of video or still pho­tog­ra­phy of Hous­ton in the pub­lic domain, but every­thing used in this film has been care­ful­ly pruned to show her thought­ful depths – indeed the final words go to Whit­ney say­ing how she would like to be remembered.

And that’s a dif­fi­cult task when she isn’t here to ask, so the doc returns, time and again, to that voice, and when the end comes, it’s Whitney’s voice that we hear. The lack of access to her loved ones dilutes the film’s sense of inti­ma­cy, while adding melan­choly by forc­ing the real­i­sa­tion that her for­mer world has gone up in smoke.