Whitney **** (2018, Whitney Houston, Bobbi Kristina Brown, Bobby Brown, Cissy Houston) – Movie Review

Loved it! Director Kevin Macdonald’s in-depth film Whitney is an extremely powerful and disturbing documentary telling the ultimately tragic story of chart-topping singer Whitney Houston, with marvellous archive footage and intimately revealing interviews. With access to the Houston estate’s archives, thanks to official support by her estate, it also contains precious footage from personal home movies.

With so many tremendous clips and archive footage, all brilliantly researched and assembled, it is a wonderfully entertaining film, especially in its early sections, bringing back the thrill of the Eighties, before the serious stuff really kicks in, with all the demons and the haunting and being haunted, and then is becomes deeply moving.

The documentary Whitney is great reminder of Whitney’s wonderful voice and attractive personality in the Eighties. And it has to be said, and Des O’Connor said it to her on his TV chat show, she was lovely.

The quintessential tragic diva, she was the essence of fun, but, with her addiction to cigarettes, alcohol, weed and cocaine, she was rotting and dying inside, a result of physical and emotional abuse by members of her family. The documentary carefully documents this, drawing out its interview subjects into a rare candour. This is the disturbing element of the film, along with the singer’s plunge into despair, ruining her voice so she could not sing at all any more, and still needing to tour because she needed the money, having lost all her huge fortune, through various ways, again carefully documented.

Whitney herself was much loved, but perhaps did not chose who she should get close to very wisely. It is a sad, sad story, recalling the ones told in the John Curry documentary The Ice King and the McQueen film.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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