More than cocaine, pills, alcohol, or
marijuana, Whitney Houston died at the young age of 48 from a broken heart,
mind, and spirit. Whitney, Kevin
Macdonald’s 2018 documentary about the late singer and actress, sports a poster
that reads, “All the music. All the stories. All the answers.” While Whitney hits a lot of the high notes in
terms of Houston’s discography, and the low notes in terms of her downfall, the
documentary feels somewhat unmoving not in terms of the answers it’s able to
provide, but its arrangement of those answers.
“Was Whitney bisexual?” Yes. “Was Whitney
abused?” Yes. “Was Whitney culturally black and white?” Yes. The documentary
answers these questions and more, but is ineffective in funneling the ample
source material into a potent narrative. Given the magnitude of Houston’s
popularity, and the intriguing elements of her backstory, Whitney’s execution of the pop star’s life story is underwhelming.
The documentary opens with a montage of
television clips from the 1980s. Coca-Cola commercials. Ronald McDonald
commercials. Whitney Houston videos. Ronald Reagan speaking. “Crack is Wack”
campaign. Whitney Houston video. Rinse. Repeat. The message: in the '80s,
Whitney Houston was as American as apple pie. The montage then starts to mix in
clips of the 1967 race riots in Newark, New Jersey, just four years after Houston
was born.
Like anything else, Houston was a product of
her environment, as the film shows. Born to a family of singers, including her
mother Cissy Houston and her cousins Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick, Whitney had
the advantages of not only looks and raw talent, but influence and tutelage to
help bolster her career. Unfortunately, however, she also had many demons to
run away from, including sexual abuse from someone close to her growing up.
In the documentary, Whitney’s ex-husband Bobby
Brown states that “drugs didn’t kill her”, which dubiously begs the question,
“then what did?”
Was it mental illness brought on by childhood
trauma? Was it a neglectful inner circle that benefited from not confronting
the pop star about her health issues? Was it us, the audience, complicit in
this toxic stardom that would likely warp most of us into oblivion? Whitney provides enough evidence to
answer these questions, but does so in a way that is somewhat anticlimactic, an
unfitting tribute to someone who made a career in hitting the right notes at
the right time, in the most dramatic of ways.
--Blake Pynnonen
