Whitney: Can I Be Me?

What’s my favourite Whitney track? The question swilled round my head, watching Nick Broomfield’s sad yet compelling documentary about the life (and death, in 2012) of pristine-looking pop star, Whitney Houston.

I’m a How Will I Know fan, but partial to I Wanna Dance With Somebody (who isn’t?) and always liked her more funky side, such as on I’m Your Baby Tonight.

Evaluating her artistry, while the film charts her self-destruction, I wondered, as Broomfield sort of does, how the two were linked.

The footage and pictures of her as a teenager are heart-meltingly cute. So bright is the smile, so gutsy the voice as a 12-year-old soloing in church, and so striking the bone structure, there’s almost no way she wasn’t going to be a star.

Did she want to be? There’s a suggestion here that her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, pushed Whitney to have the career she herself never had. Then something more interesting happens – Clive Davis, boss of Arista Records, spots in Whitney the chance to create the perfect crossover pop princess, moulding his beautiful, young black star for success with a white audience.

That certainly worked – Whitney had more successive no 1 singles in America than anyone since The Beatles, with I Will Always Love You at the top for 14 weeks. But it did lead to Whitney being booed at the Soul Train Music Awards, called a sell-out by the black audience – an event one contributor recalls as ‘devastating’ for a girl from the ‘hood’.

Broomfield might have been on to a fascinating thesis about race in music. It’s a spectre that hangs over the film, rather unexplored, and it may have been a factor in Whitney falling for the bad boy of R&B, Bobby Brown. The pair embarked on a long spiral of drugs and alcohol which was, I felt, a bit dull to watch and easy to explain away. We’ve seen drugs ruin many a singer’s career, most recently in the Oscar-winning Amy, about Amy Winehouse, by Asif Kapadia.

Perhaps the oddest feeling comes in watching previously unseen footage of a 1999 concert tour (shot by Rudi Dolezal, who gets a co-directing credit for the material), in which Whitney plays arenas in places such as Mannheim, Leipzig and Vienna – how much further from the ‘hood’ could a girl get?

None of this really excuses the drug addiction. Nor can any half-baked theorising by the piano player or saxophonist or even her bodyguard, Dave Roberts, a former policeman from Wales, who rather relishes the sound of his own ideas.

The film’s clock duly ticks down to when Whitney was found dead in a bath at the Beverly Hilton, aged 48, surrounded by the grubby drug paraphernalia. It’s sad, yes, but not as moving as it might have been.

Broomfield is famous for popping up in his movies, often holding a boom mic over his interviewees, as he investigates what happened to Kurt and Courtney or Biggie and Tupac. It’s curious and disappointing we don’t get that here, when there’s so much mystery to probe, and when the sadness is even more tragic with the death, three years later, of Whitney’s daughter Bobbi Kristina, who we’ve seen as a little girl jumping about on stage with her mom during that 1999 tour.

So, instead, I was wishing there were more songs in the film – and trying not to belt out that big key change chorus of ‘and I…’ in the middle of the critics’ screening.

I’m not sure Whitney was a game-changing, era-defining artist, but maybe she paved the way for Mariah, Beyoncé and the warblers and belters of TV talent shows. She had a gorgeous, well-trained voice but her cultural impact hasn’t lasted and the film, as its questioning title suggests, can’t quite nail her. One of her biggest hits was So Emotional. Packed as it might be with opinions, this cold-eyed movie could have done with the rawness of more of that.