Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Whitney Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 18, 2018

There are at least a couple of kind of appalling moments in Whitney where the iconic singer’s personal issues are used as fodder for comedy in shows like a scabrous (animated) sitcom or a sketch comedy enterprise, and so it’s perhaps understandable why those issues seem to raise the hackles of what may be still grieving fans. I personally discovered just how intense Whitney’s fan base is when I jokingly subtitled our The Bodyguard Blu-ray review “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” which one fan of Houston’s incorrectly assumed was some kind of snipe at her substance abuse situation, which was then very much in the news due to her then quite recent death. That fan came after me with figurative guns a-blazin’, but other, perhaps more objective, readers, rightly assessed that my comment was a joke about the film, not Houston per se. For those who weren’t around and paying attention to pop music when Whitney Houston erupted like a supernova in the mid-eighties, it’s hard to really explain what a phenomenon she was — and how long that phenomenon persisted in the often ephemeral world of “hit based” music. I personally can still remember watching music centric cable channels back in those days where Houston’s promotional videos were simply inescapable, and even then, as she shattered sales records and charted Number One Billboard hits like Steph Curry or Ray Allen aced three pointers, some MTV and VH1 video jocks were joking about aspects of her appearance (I remember one particularly snarky guy, maybe Don Imus (?), repeatedly mentioning the little “scrunch” line between her eyebrows that would appear when she’d belt especially forcefully). There was a grace and ebullience to several of those early Houston music videos (and of course their underlying singles) that were like little jolts of adrenaline in an otherwise kind of stale and rote “big hair” environment of pop and rock music in those days. But like so many other gifted artists who have battled with various personal demons, Houston couldn’t quite outrun her fate, and unfortunately became just another “statistic” in the sometimes (often?) cruel annals of show business, and industry that seems hell bent on sucking incredibly talented individuals into its gaping maws, only to chew them up and spit them out as veritable shells of their former selves.

There’s a beautiful song from the legendary team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David called “All Kinds of People” which was featured on one of Burt’s early seventies albums that has an incredibly distinctive lead vocal, and which was my personal introduction to seeing this particular singer's namel. It’s a voice that is eerily similar to the singer who so defined the Bacharach- David sound (largely) in the sixties, Dionne Warwick, and yet which is definitely different from Dionne’s distinctive tone. The reason for the similarity may be genetic, since “All Kinds of People” features the smoky voice of Cissy Houston, who is of course Dionne’s aunt and (no big surprise here) Whitney’s mother. While it was this tune that brought Cissy to my eyes (and ears), as the documentary makes clear, she was a very prolific backup singer in her day, working with a who's who of all time greats. There’s obviously a deep vein of talent, maybe even genius, running through this family (noted opera singer Leontyne Pryce is also a relative), and it was perhaps fated that Whitney should ascend to pop superstardom.

However, as becomes fairly evident as director Kevin Macdonald interviews several members of both Whitney's "nuclear" (if divorced and estranged) family and her extended family, there are some dark strains that also run through the relatives. Whitney's brothers are on hand documenting her early introduction to drug use (courtesy of those very brothers), and there are other, more troubling, accusations levied at one of the Warwick clan in terms of abuse Whitney states she suffered when her Mom was frequently on tour and the young Houston kids were shunted hither and yon to stay with various folks.

Therefore, there's almost a foregone trajectory in this story, even for those who "lived" it along with Whitney. What's so incredibly sad about both Whitney and Whitney is how completely sweet and unaffected Houston seems throughout, even at later, obviously more debilitated, stages of her life and/or career. There are a lot of fascinating interviews in this piece, though it's notable that some of the shorter ones are with Cissy, who speaks mostly about singing and toughness, and Bobby Brown, who pretty much shuts down Kevin Macdonald at the mere mention of drug use.

It becomes obvious over the course of the documentary that Whitney was a much more complex person on any number of levels than she was "packaged" to be for the general public. And in fact some of her psychological turmoil is seen as having been at least exacerbated by her childhood trauma with one of the Warwicks, but later with regard to a sexuality one of the talking heads in this piece refers to as "fluid". This is a "warts and all" documentary, and it includes some pretty scathing commentary on the "parenting" of both Whitney and Bobby with regard to their now tragically deceased daughter.

But through it all is the music. While it's actually kind of shocking to hear Whitney booed pretty aggressively by a black audience or decried as "Whitey" Houston by Al Sharpton (who ironically is referenced later mourning the icon), there is simply no denying the pure power and, yes, soul of Houston's voice. It really doesn't matter whether she's singing a gospel tune or the latest pop confection by a Caucasian songwriter, her voice had unbelievable energy and purity, at least in the early going. And hopefully that will be her true legacy going forward.

Whitney Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Whitney is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a variety of aspect ratios, mostly due to a glue of archival video, but with all of the new interview segments and many of the still photographs in 1.85:1. As typically happens in a documentary cobbled together from such a wide variety of source elements, quality is widely variant. All of the contemporary shot material looks sharp and well detailed, though the palette is pretty drab, tending toward grays and browns (no pun intended, considering Bobby's participation). The archival video is all over the place. There is some home movie material that looks like it may have been sourced from 8mm, but even some of the old television material can look pretty rough at times. Nothing is unwatchable by any stretch, but there's a certain heterogeneity to this presentation that has to be accepted, and which actually should be welcomed, given the relative rarity of some of the footage presented here.

Whitney Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While Whitney features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, some may feel it's unnecessary, since so much of the documentary is simply talking heads and/or voiceovers, with most of the music left to interstitial snippets (or even consigned to "background" material, as a voice talks over it). The surround track does open up these brief snippets, but otherwise this is really almost a "mono" presentation, at least during the talking heads segments. Fidelity is fine throughout, and even the archival video segments tend to have excellent audio (some of the oldest snippets, including Whitney as a schoolgirl singing in church, do occasionally show their age). It's notable that there are quite a few candid audio recordings of Whitney sprinkled through the piece.

Whitney Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Producer Simon Chinn and Director Kevin Macdonald


• Whitney Photo Gallery (1080p; 1:09)


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:32)

Whitney Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's no escaping the melancholy that pervades Whitney, and in fact a couple of the people interview just start sobbing uncontrollably at various moments. Whitney Houston seemed to have it all, but in a way she was plagued by both having too much and never having enough. Whitney does an admirable job of presenting the real woman behind the superstar, and anyone who loved Whitney's singing or even her somewhat limited film career should find this documentary fascinating and moving. Highly recommended.