Whitney: Can I Be Me. (15.)
Directed by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal.
Featuring Whitney Houston, Cissy Houston, Bobby Brown, Robyn Crawford and David Roberts.
Usually a Nick Broomfield film about a deceased music artist will be a search of someone to blame. Who killed Kurt Cobain? Who killed Tupac? This film about the singer who died aged 48 in a hotel bath aged 48, offers up an array of suspects, but doesn't get to point the finger. While nobody among the selection of family, friends and hangers-on here are entirely blameless, nobody seems entirely malevolent. Granted, mother Cissy seems to be a tough old bird that you'd be ill advised to get on the wrong side of, but even Whitney's philandering berk husband Bobby Brown appears to have genuinely loved her, in his own crap way. They all meant well but were all just a little too weak, a little too dependent on her, a little too drunk or stoned, to rouse themselves to sound the alarm, and Whitney was just a little too flawed to do it herself. Call it Whitney: a Set of Unfortunate Circumstances.
Broomfield has made a solid, efficient, seemingly honest but slightly anonymous chronicle of her decline. Anonymous though could be a good new look for Broomfield, whose better known for his face-on-camera, dangling-a-boommike school of documentary filmmaking. He trailblundered a path for everybody from Michael Moore to Louis Theroux but he's been a little lost of late. There were a couple of dramatic features, Ghosts and The Battle of Haditha in the late 2000s that didn't get the recognition they deserved and I last saw him back on the documentary beat, chasing around after Sarah Palin, back in the innocent times when the toxic milf seemed to be the worst monster the Republican party were capable of dredging up.
For Whitney, he is heard and not seen; conducting interviews with the members of the entourage willing to speak to him. The best of these is her former Bodyguard, David Roberts, who rather than Kevin Costner looks like Simon Pegg, sounds like Anthony Hopkins and brings some clipped understatement to the portrait. Most of the film though is archive footage, a lot of it taken from an unreleased backstage documentary about the German leg of her 1999 world tour (enough to get its director Dolezal a co director credit on this) in which her life was just beginning to unravel.
The movie gets you inside what is ultimately a surprisingly straightforward story of fame, hangers on and drugs. The story is generic, only the specifics are new. There is surprisingly little about her music, it's taken for granted that we know all about it. The subtitle Can I Be Me, is taken from the idea that her early record company boss Clive Davis had shaped her as an artist that would be aimed at the white audience, rather than her own gospel background, but it is not a line that the film pursues with any force. Arguably, her tragedy is that they did let her be her, and that was what killed her.
Directed by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal.
Featuring Whitney Houston, Cissy Houston, Bobby Brown, Robyn Crawford and David Roberts.
Usually a Nick Broomfield film about a deceased music artist will be a search of someone to blame. Who killed Kurt Cobain? Who killed Tupac? This film about the singer who died aged 48 in a hotel bath aged 48, offers up an array of suspects, but doesn't get to point the finger. While nobody among the selection of family, friends and hangers-on here are entirely blameless, nobody seems entirely malevolent. Granted, mother Cissy seems to be a tough old bird that you'd be ill advised to get on the wrong side of, but even Whitney's philandering berk husband Bobby Brown appears to have genuinely loved her, in his own crap way. They all meant well but were all just a little too weak, a little too dependent on her, a little too drunk or stoned, to rouse themselves to sound the alarm, and Whitney was just a little too flawed to do it herself. Call it Whitney: a Set of Unfortunate Circumstances.
Broomfield has made a solid, efficient, seemingly honest but slightly anonymous chronicle of her decline. Anonymous though could be a good new look for Broomfield, whose better known for his face-on-camera, dangling-a-boommike school of documentary filmmaking. He trailblundered a path for everybody from Michael Moore to Louis Theroux but he's been a little lost of late. There were a couple of dramatic features, Ghosts and The Battle of Haditha in the late 2000s that didn't get the recognition they deserved and I last saw him back on the documentary beat, chasing around after Sarah Palin, back in the innocent times when the toxic milf seemed to be the worst monster the Republican party were capable of dredging up.
For Whitney, he is heard and not seen; conducting interviews with the members of the entourage willing to speak to him. The best of these is her former Bodyguard, David Roberts, who rather than Kevin Costner looks like Simon Pegg, sounds like Anthony Hopkins and brings some clipped understatement to the portrait. Most of the film though is archive footage, a lot of it taken from an unreleased backstage documentary about the German leg of her 1999 world tour (enough to get its director Dolezal a co director credit on this) in which her life was just beginning to unravel.
The movie gets you inside what is ultimately a surprisingly straightforward story of fame, hangers on and drugs. The story is generic, only the specifics are new. There is surprisingly little about her music, it's taken for granted that we know all about it. The subtitle Can I Be Me, is taken from the idea that her early record company boss Clive Davis had shaped her as an artist that would be aimed at the white audience, rather than her own gospel background, but it is not a line that the film pursues with any force. Arguably, her tragedy is that they did let her be her, and that was what killed her.
