Nick Broomfield, Rudi Dolezal (2017)

It starts with news footage from outside the Beverly Hilton, where Whitney Houston died in February 2012, accompanied by the recording of the call made to emergency services to report the discovery, in a hotel bathroom, of the seemingly dead body of a ‘forty-six-year-old female’ (Houston was actually forty-eight).  The conversation on the recording is between two male voices.  A third then comes on the soundtrack:  ‘They say Whitney Houston died from drug addiction …’  There’s a ‘but’ coming and you automatically think:  don’t tell me – she died of a broken heart.  This is just what the voice does tell you (twice).  As suggested in its title, a main theme of Nick Broomfield’s film is that Whitney Houston, throughout her career, was a victim of interlinked personal, social, and commercial pressures that prevented authentic self-expression.  Chief among these were a controlling mother, homophobia and industry packaging of her talents that downplayed her ethnicity and gospel roots and made her, to R&B enthusiasts, artificial – soul-less, in both senses of the word.  That died-of-a-broken-heart opener foreshadows an ironic and persistent problem with Whitney: Can I Be Me.  Its subject is still being manipulated, five years after her death:  this may be a documentary but Whitney Houston is trapped in the prescribed form of a showbiz tragedy biopic.

Rudi Dolezal shares the directing credit because he shot footage of Houston’s last international tour in 1999 for a documentary that never saw the light of day.  A legend at the start of Can I Be Me announces that this footage hasn’t been publicly available until now and Nick Broomfield makes extensive, perhaps excessive use of it.  Not much of the tour footage is of Houston singing, however – there’s more backstage and inter-number business – and this is typical of the film as a whole.  I didn’t know much about Whitney Houston beforehand or many of her songs but I was surprised not to hear ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ or ‘One Moment in Time’ or ‘Saving All My Love for You’.  Perhaps Broomfield simply wasn’t able to get the rights to some of her biggest hits but the effect of their absence is to reinforce the generic quality of his piece.  Without the music – which, however commercially calculating it may have been, was given individuality by her phenomenal voice – Houston is at risk of being reduced to the focus of just another drink-and-drugs-fuelled train-wreck story.  Nick Broomfield compounds this effect in the last minutes of Can I Be Me, as he tries to inject, with tearful testimony from Whitney’s maid, sentimental drama into the grim discovery in her suite in the Beverly Hilton, even though he made clear at the beginning what happened there.

It’s fortunate for the film that its protagonist comes across as thoughtfully candid in some of the interview excerpts.  Houston’s drug habit and controversial marriage to Bobby Brown were already making headlines by the mid-1990s.  In an interview then, she’s asked if she’s paying the ‘price of success’.  She explains that, and why, fame rather than success is the problem – the explanation goes some way to transcending price-of-frame cliché.  (Rudi Dolezal’s tour footage helps with this too, conveying a dynamic and alarming picture of superstardom as living in not just a bubble but a madhouse.)  In a later interview, Diane Sawyer reels off alcohol, cocaine and other kinds of narcotic and asks Houston if she’s been addicted to these.  She says she has – to all of them.  With a professionally sympathetic smile, Sawyer turns the knife:  ‘Which of them was the biggest devil?’  ‘The biggest devil … that would be me,’ replies Houston, also smiling.  This simple acceptance of moral responsibility briefly shows her Christian faith in a different light – in sharp, bracing contrast to another moment in the film, when she delivers a public prayer.   Whitney’s parents and brothers were among her employees; the tone of her praying voice suggests that she considers God another valued member of her support team.

Whitney: Can I Be Me features a fair number of talking heads, including family members, musicians and David Roberts, the Welshman who was Whitney Houston’s real-life bodyguard for several years.  Roberts, a cross between Michael Sheen and Jason Watkins, is rather too pleased with his straight-talking eccentricity – and, in due course, self-righteousness – but he’s amusing when he makes clear that, while working for Whitney and unlike the Kevin Costner character in The Bodyguard, he never got shot and never made love to his boss.  Roberts and most of the other interviewees express very definite ideas as to what went wrong – Nick Broomfield doesn’t probe differences of opinion between them.  Nor does he examine assertions made about Houston’s musical significance and issues arising from these assertions.  One contributor declares that Whitney was the first black female pop chart-topper – and, as such, paved the way for the likes of Beyoncé.  If we accept this number-one-pioneer label (I wondered about Diana Ross), the implications of the packaging of Whitney Houston are startling.  It seems the politically objectionable ‘whitening’ of her improved the opportunities for – and accelerated the success of – other African-American women singers.  Broomfield doesn’t acknowledge this at all, let alone examine it.

If Whitney Houston felt she was at the mercy of other people and forces, you wonder who or what compelled her to put her and Bobby Brown’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, so prematurely in the spotlight.  The six-year-old girl joins her mother on stage at one of the tour shows recorded by Rudi Dolezal.  It’s bad enough when a celebrity parent parades their child in this way on television.  In the fervid atmosphere of a rock concert arena, with its vast audience and onslaught of sound and light, it’s grotesque and upsetting.  (I had this reaction unaware, until I found out later in the film, that Bobbi Kristina Brown died in 2015 at the age of twenty-two, after drug problems of her own.)  It’s a pity that her formidable mother Cissy, supposedly a determined and enduring influence on Whitney, wasn’t able to put her foot down about this.  Perhaps Nick Broomfield is making a like-mother-like-daughter point – suggesting that Whitney took a leaf out of Cissy’s book in feeding Bobbi Kristina to an insatiable public – though Cissy clearly didn’t so in such a stark and flagrant way.

The most positively impressive supporting character in this sad story is Whitney’s long-time friend, confidante and assistant, Robyn Crawford; the questions about the nature of the relationship between the two women provide the most interesting expression of the film’s idea that Whitney Houston was never allowed to be her true self.  The attractively butch Robyn Crawford is a naturally imposing screen presence.  You never doubt her complete personal and professional dedication to Whitney.  The notorious tensions between Robyn and Bobby Brown are illustrated in a bit from the 1999 tour footage that’s gripping in more ways than one.  Bobby makes an extended joke of their enmity – chattering continuously as he holds on to Robyn and won’t let her go.  After trying and failing to get free, she resigns herself to the humiliation in angry silence. She left the Houston team the following year.  (The closing legends note that Robyn now has a wife and children.)  In a television interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2013, Cissy Houston says she doesn’t know if her daughter was gay.  Asked if she’d have had a problem with it if Whitney was gay, Cissy replies ‘Absolutely’.  (When Oprah asks if Cissy therefore welcomed the arrival on the scene of Bobby Brown, the answer is a similarly decisive ‘No’.)  The journalist Allison Samuels, who regards Robyn Crawford as the one person who, for as long as she could, helped Whitney Houston ‘keep it together’, points out the impossibility of a star like her going public about being lesbian or bisexual in the 1980s or 1990s.  More strikingly and surprisingly, Samuels (who is black) goes on to say that ‘you don’t hear about’ gay female relationships in the African-American community more generally – ’men, yes, but not women’.  ‘Even today?’ asks a voice, presumably Nick Broomfield’s.  ‘Even today’, insists Samuels.

21 June 2017