The lightning-fast ascent and slow, cocaine-fueled fall of Whitney Houston is the latest in a seemingly never-ending line of harrowing stories about a generational musical talent who succumbs to the evils of drug abuse and bad choices in partners, both business and personal. And yet what spell does director Kevin Macdonald weave in Whitney his lucid, forensic-level documentary that makes Houston’s tale feel more tragic?
Its power is all the more impressive upon learning that Whitney was produced by the late singer’s sister-in-law, Patricia Houston, and is the only filmed accounting of Houston’s life created with the blessing of Whitney’s estate. This could have been the kiss of death, considering the impulse of the Whitney-adjacent to use the film to protect their image, deflect blame or inflate their role in her success. This hardly seems the case with most interviewees with the exception of record producer LA Reid and Whitney’s idiotic ex-husband, Bobby Brown, who she reportedly married to deflect criticism she wasn’t “black enough” and who refuses here to admit that drugs had any effect on Whitney’s life, as if saying nothing would exonerate him in the public eye.
Macdonald is not interested in hagiography and this is not a jukebox musical. There is a mystery to solve: how Whitney went from the bright and beautiful 19-year old who brought down the house singing “Home” on “The Merv Griffin Show” to a coke-addicted, rehab veteran who could barely hold a note on her final and embarrassing world tour in 2009. Macdonald’s answer will force us to rethink Houston’s remarkable career and conclude that the seeds of both her talent and her tragic end were planted in childhood. Macdonald, whose off-camera voice can be heard during the interviews, gets Whitney’s brother Michael and half-brother Gary Garland, to admit they introduced Whitney to drugs when she was a mere girl. Combine that with a dictatorial mother, the gossip singer Cissie Houston, who once tricked Whitney into her first solo performance by pretending she was sick and asking Whitney to performer in her place.
Macdonald, who switches between directing feature films (Last King of Scotland) and documentaries (Touching the Void), has a detective’s mind and a craftsman’s eye: more than once he isolates Whitney’s vocal-track to unsettling effect and uses quick-cut montages to establish the timeframe and major events of the day. Juicy anecdotes of a positive variety are few and far between, the best is the behind the scenes story of Houston’s classic, try-not-to-cry rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXV. The amount of never before seen footage culled from family members, friends and record execs is astonishing and he reveals some secrets that help us understand how Whitney’s life was compromised from the start, namely the extra-marital affair Cissy had with a preacher and the sexual abuse Whitney reportedly suffered as a child from her cousin, Dee Dee Warwick.
Whitney opens and closes with the singer telling the story of a dream she has where “the devil is trying to get me — he never gets me, but when I wake up, I’m always exhausted from running.” As we learn in Macdonald’s fascinating, heartbreaking, film, the devil had her all along.