The life and legacy of Whitney Houston, who died in 2012 at the age of 48 in a Los Angeles hotel room is too big to be distilled down into one documentary. So it’s entirely fitting that to date, there are two documentaries.
The first, Can I Be Me, is based on footage shot by Nick Broomfield, who had Whitney’s approval to follow her during what turned out to be a tumultuous tour. The second, simply titled Whitney, takes more of an overview of her life and was approved by Whitney’s estate and family. Directed by Scot Kevin McDonald, who also directed The Last King of Scotland and the Marley documentary about the reggae legend, it’s surprisingly candid.
Watch the ‘Whitney’ trailer:
Whitney Houston was, at one point, the biggest Black pop female superstar in an orbit that only Janet Jackson and the biracial Mariah Carey inhabited. These celebrated stars existed in the rarefied air that only Madonna also inhabited at the time and Janet and Whitney, as the most recognizably Black stars, were particular sources of pride for the Black community.
Whitney covers that reality, along with the back story of Whitney’s life, much of which if it was known at all, was only known to her closest fans and followers. It covers her childhood in Newark and her relationships with her mother, brothers, her controversial relationship with friend and creative director Robyn Crawford and of course, her marriage to Bobby Brown with whom she had her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown. As we now know, Bobbi Kristina’s life had a similarly tragic end as she, too, died in a bathtub at age 22.
Where Whitney shines is in the details – from surprising information about her parents as well as the damning admissions of her brothers Michael and Gary about how culpable they were in Whitney’s drug addiction. The two people who have the least to say – Bobby Brown and Gary’s wife and Whitney’s longtime manager Pat Houston, aren’t really needed, as Whitney’s intimates including her aunt, hairdresser, agent and producing partner provide devastating testimony as to Whitney’s state of mind and the toll fame took on her psyche.
Interview with Pat Houston
If you’ve read Cissy Houston’s book, then you had some sense that Whitney was failed by her family in some significant ways – from her mother’s harshness to her father managing and then ultimately suing her for millions of dollars.
What is made clear by the documentary is that Whitney was often a reluctant superstar, who may have done better for herself had she accepted what seems to be her bisexuality and the one person who appears to have truly loved her the most completely – Crawford.
Instead a toxic combination of the demands of fame, her family abandoning their own aspirations to “support” her career, her insecurities and the difficulties of being a Black woman in a tough business along with a tenacious drug addiction precipitated her tragic downfall.
In combination, the docs provide a cautionary tale of the music business and its particular racial and sexual politics (for much of Whitney’s career, and even in both documentaries, whites profit off her talent, while Whitney was struggling financially) the challenges of any drug addict but especially when the addict is a celebrity and can afford both drugs and the enablers to provide them.
Unfortunately, as Is the case with many Black artists, Black people do not tell their story and therefore, nuances are lost. While McDonald captures the times that made Whitney a superstar and touches on the racial politics, he doesn’t explore how specifically being a Black woman raised in the church may have impacted her and her relationships.
Whitney on Oprah in 1999:
He also takes a very heavy hand to her struggles, especially in the doc’s grim last half hour, without reconciling some of the overtures she made to the Black community. Her starring roles in Waiting To Exhale and The Preachers Wife are omitted, as is her “I’m Every Woman” video with TLC, her 1998 My Love is Your Love album with production by Wyclef and Rodney Jerkins and her R&B hit “Heartbreak Hotel” with Faith Evans and Kelly Price.
Her comeback performance of Diane Warren’s “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” at the American Music Awards, a moment people cheered is also not included. What that does is limit both Whitney’s voice in her story and reduces her career and life to the tragic moments and not the triumphant ones.
Clearly, Whitney was a woman too complex for just one or two docs. These docs provide some measure of closure in terms of what led to some of her problems and the end of her life, as well as the end of her daughter’s life, the seeds of which are laid out in the doc.
But Whitney’s gift, her music and her life deserve a far more intimate treatment that gives her more of a central position in her own story and establishes her as the Black woman she always felt she was, although she was marketed – and accepted the marketing – as race neutral.
While Whitney is a devastating look at the ultimate price of fame, perhaps there is a third doc yet to be done that will allow for a truly complete picture of a woman accepted and honed her God-given talents but whose life was inexorably altered and perhaps shortened by them as well.
