One of these days, someone will make a film about the life of Whitney Houston that opens not with sombre notes of foreboding, but the pure sugar-pop rush of the intro to "How Will I Know" or the key change that takes "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" to a whole new level - something of what drew us to the singer in the first place, rather than the sorry facts that have since entered the public domain. Perhaps it's too soon; perhaps we're all still in the mourning phase. Last year's Whitney: "Can I Be Me" - overseen by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal - was the independent inquiry into the singer's demise, arriving at the conclusion that the singer's mounting dependency issues and eventual suicide in 2012 were consequences of the power struggle that opened up between Houston's manager (and reputed lover) Robyn Crawford and her bad-boy ex Bobby Brown, alleged to have plied his spouse with drugs as a way of controlling her during his philandering. A year on, and we have Whitney, a rival, more authorised-seeming project, directed by documentary maven Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) as an Amazon Prime production, with input from those family members who snubbed the Broomfield film, and a title that aligns it with a movie memorial-monument like Asif Kapadia's Amy.
There is, and possibly could only ever be, some crossover in the films' sprawling patchworks of archival footage: the same clip of the singer's aunt Dionne Warwick performing "Walk on By" serves to establish the roots of this dynasty, while a baseline of good showbiz behaviour is again laid down using highlights of the teenage and twentysomething Whitney cutting such a modest and charming figure on the U.S. chatshow circuit. Yet the two films' fields of inquiry differ noticeably. Broomfield, as Broomfield does, went sniffing around the fringes of the singer's entourage, and suggested external forces might be to blame for her eventual demise; Macdonald brings us closer to Whitney's already somewhat troubled lineage, and the difficulties she faced within a rapidly changing entertainment industry. This is, in short, the inside story, setting its camera at one point to roam around Whitney's spooky, now mausoleum-like retreat in the snowy New Jersey woods, and encouraging a generally confessional tone that yields one major last-reel revelation/talking point.
Getting the family on side opens up new angles of investigation. From the singer's siblings, we learn just what it felt like to see your mother - singer Cissy Houston - driving away on a regular basis to fulfil some new showbiz obligation, and to find out that your father - Whitney's sometime manager John - had tapped the home telephone as a means of controlling the emotional fallout from his philandering. (Your inner pop psychologist makes a note: well, hello Bobby.) Robyn, in some ways the closest the Broomfield film got to a hero, clearly had a complicated relationship with this Godfearing clan: Whitney's brother (and sometime backing singer) Gary Garland-Houston spits out the words "opportunist" and "lesbian" with much the same barely veiled contempt. And this Whitney does seem a shade happier around Bobby than she was in the previous doc, though that may just be a consequence of Macdonald inviting Brown himself to say his very terse, very curt piece; even so, it still seems very odd, and most psychologically telling, that the singer should have hooked up with him at the same Soul Train awards where she was booed and he was feted to the rafters.
In this narrative, it's Houston's own brothers who supplied her with the drugs, as a way of maintaining that fifty-kilowatt smile over increasingly punishing tour and recording schedules. The family is thus placed within the context of the global entertainment business, and the viewer is invited to reconcile - as Whitney herself never could - the poised star on the talkshow sofa with the glum soul caught in behind-the-scenes camcorder footage: the haunting image Broomfield alighted upon, of the multi-millionaire singer sitting disconsolately at her make-up table, turns out not to have been the anomaly it was presented as. In recent decades, our screens have been awash with personalities who've had no qualms whatsoever about abandoning whatever they once stood for and reconfiguring themselves as that most saleable yet hollowest of concepts, the international brand; these exemplars of the 1% have enjoyed the near-unprecedented success that follows from persuading pliable consumers that selling out is no biggie, all part of the circus, if not the circus itself. (The Houstons present as the tragic mirror-image of the Kardashians, the clan who best calculated the rewards a shameless age offers those prepared to wash their dirty linen in public.)
Macdonald charts Houston's rise and fall within the wider selling of American culture: his Whitney emerges from niggling montages of MTV idents, Coke and McDonald's ads, Reagan announcing "America is working", the 24/7 razzle-dazzle that can conceal all manner of rottenness and human weakness besides. A generally sombre film gets its biggest (albeit most rueful) chuckle when former Arista Records CEO L.A. Reid claims that - despite all the newspaper reports, despite the ample physical evidence that his star employee was wasting away - he simply had no idea his million-dollar advances had been ending up in the pockets of drug dealers: as good an illustration as any of what we might call implausible deniability. (As is often the case these days, we're left wondering whether those we have elevated to positions of power are horribly calculating or just horrendously ignorant.) In places, Macdonald overreaches: odd flickers of protest footage in the montage seemingly want to link Whitney's decline to the Black Lives Matter movement, a topical yet tenuous connection weakened by the fact his subject enjoyed considerable privilege, and that her death was ultimately, for all the chains of causality these films have set out, self-inflicted.
Yet he's more engaged with the music than was Broomfield, in part because he can use it to bolster his argument. We spend much of these two hours watching to see exactly where it all started to go sour, or just where the singer began wrapping herself in protective quotation marks. A campy live performance of "I Will Always Love You" from 1994 signals encroaching boredom, a transition from fresh-faced star to semi-disinterested diva; thereafter, that heavenly voice becomes secondary to onstage stunts - macking with Brown, or ushering on the couple's toddling, clearly reticent offspring Bobbi Kristina to share the limelight for a number or two. (There may be no words for the pendant-tragedy of Whitney's daughter, a sadness born of sadness: Macdonald confines his to a single, stark information card before the closing credits.) By the time this once graceful performer is caught burping on camera while a sweaty, twitchy Bobby is denying he ever slept with Lil Kim, something's clearly gone awry: here is the kind of celebs-gone-wild video that would nowadays spread like chlamydia, and it's a testimony to Whitney's people that we never saw it at the time. (One way to escape the image that's been constructed for you is, of course, to trash it completely.)
As suggested by the subtitle of Broomfield's film - and a revealing clip here in which Houston, at the peak of her powers, complains to her ma about the carefully manufactured rise of choreographer-turned-singer Paula Abdul - this was a tragedy of authenticity above all else. What remains so jolting about Whitney's first TV appearance on The Merv Griffin Show in 1983 - a clip both docs seize upon, and which Macdonald very poignantly uses to bookend the rise and fall - is its utter, unimpeachable sincerity, that of a good Christian girl who believes absolutely in every word and every note of what she's belting out. Whitney is the story of how that sincerity came to be compromised and eroded, by celebrity, riches and the people around her. Strange to think that this toothsome, wholesome figure was undergoing the same agonies as Kurt Cobain - another of Broomfield's studies in accursed success - but we might now see both as canaries in the coalmine of an increasingly corporate business, grist to a mill, unable to survive the cultural shift that saw pop's carefree dressing-up game replaced by cruel mechanisms. What Macdonald's film shares with Kapadia's Amy is an underlying sense that, whether we consumed or enabled their subjects, we were in some way to blame for their demise; but revisiting this death in particular at our moment of endless snark, constructed realities and fake news, the simpler truth - and the greatest tragedy of all - may be that we no longer deserved her.
Whitney opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment