Monthly Archives: June 2017

  • Whitney: Can I Be Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Churchill

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Teplitzky (2017)

    This is the first of two Winston Churchill biopics scheduled for release in 2017, with Darkest Hour due to arrive in cinemas in November.  You wonder why now.  A year ending in seven is one of the few portions of a decade that can’t be a World War II anniversary.  Churchill’s own dates are 1874-1965.  It’s probably mere coincidence – though you can’t help wondering if it might be Oscar-oriented thinking.  In the last ten years or so, George VI, Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher have all won Academy Awards for the actors playing them, in pictures that have also done well commercially.  The people behind Churchill and Darkest Hour may have reckoned that a central figure more obviously heroic than any of those other three should be a safe bet to deliver the same goods.

    Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man) and written by Alex von Tunzelmann, Churchill is far from a good film but it’s an odder, more conflicted one than you’d guess from the hagiographic trailer. The narrative, covering the days leading up to the Normandy landings in June 1944, and D-Day itself, begins and ends with Churchill (Brian Cox) walking on a beach.  When he looks at the sea at the start, his imagination turns it to blood.  For most of the film, Churchill is presented as egocentric yet agonised.  The bloody waters reflect his haunted remorse for the deaths of young men in the Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, a campaign waged when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.  Nostalgic for his earlier days of active soldiering, he hankers, even at the age of seventy, after being a military commander as well as a political leader. This combination of personal imperatives leads him obstinately to oppose the Allies’ plans for Operation Overlord – to the mounting exasperation of Eisenhower (John Slattery), Montgomery (Julian Wadham) and Alan Brooke (Danny Webb).  A thwarted Churchill, on the eve of D-Day, takes to his bed and falls into a near-catatonic depression.  (I assume this is a piece of dramatic licence.)

    Field Marshal Jan Smuts (Richard Durden), his old sparring partner from the Boer War and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, comes to the sick room and, with Churchill silent, starts composing on his behalf the speech the Prime Minister is to broadcast to the nation the following evening.   Accompanying Smuts is Helen Garrett (Ella Purnell), the secretary to whom, in most of their exchanges up to this point, Churchill has been abominably and aggressively rude.  He rallies enough to take issue with one of Smuts’s suggestions and to issue a renewed lament for the terrible loss of life he thinks is bound to take place on the Normandy beaches.  But Churchill is brought fully to his senses by the distraught Helen, who explains her fiancé is a midshipman on one of the Royal Navy ships involved in the planned offensive.  The moment is transformative for the film as well as its protagonist.  When he asks his wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson) what he’ll be when the war is over, she replies, ‘You’ll always be the man who led us through this’.  From this point on, Jonathan Teplitzky subscribes to the same view:  Churchill suddenly turns into what you expected it to be and stops fighting Lorne Balfe’s music – a persistent reminder, from the outset, that the film is dealing with heroic events and actions.  Churchill’s radio broadcast in light of ‘the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month’ acknowledges Eisenhower’s leadership but there are no further scenes involving Ike or Monty or Brooke.  The end sequence on the shore, like the opening one, features business with Churchill’s Homburg but the seawater now runs clear – as if D-Day had somehow redeemed Gallipoli.  The closing legends describe the Normandy landings as a decisive success,without mention of casualties, and note that Churchill is ‘often acclaimed as the greatest Briton of all time’.

    Although its unexpected and erratic aspects mitigate against predictability, Churchill is standard-issue historical biopic in other ways.  Even allowing that the title character keeps harping on the same theme, Alex von Tunzelmann’s dialogue is repetitive, as well as stagy – ditto the stiff set-ups in which Jonathan Teplitzky arranges his actors to deliver their often over-explicit lines.  The first scene in which Churchill meets Eisenhower, in the grounds of the latter’s British headquarters, with Montgomery and Brooke also in attendance, is ludicrous.  ‘If Hitler were to drop a bomb on this little patch, he would destroy the entire high command of our Allied Forces!’ declares Churchill on arrival at the gathering, with a little chuckle at his witty insight.  (You anticipate some kind of wry response from elsewhere in the high command but don’t get it:  the script, whatever its other reservations about Churchill, regards him throughout as an unsurpassable gag-man.)  Eisenhower immediately apologises that Churchill has had to travel so far for the meeting but explains that the venue had to be out of the way:  once the characters start to disagree, still in the open air, the actors, particularly Brian Cox, shout loudly enough to be heard in Berlin.  In a later scene inside his HQ, Eisenhower asks those present to take a seat after they’ve already done so.  There are times when the serious drama of Churchill verges unfortunately on the territory of sitcom (Winnie – maybe plus exclamation mark).  This is especially so when the other characters exchange eye-rolling glances, in a can-you-believe-what-the-incorrigible-old-rogue-just-said kind of way.

    Teplitzky and his cinematographer David Higgs create some impressive images of lone figures in huge landscapes or other settings – Churchill on the beach or standing at vast windows, Eisenhower among the columns of what is recognisably (to this viewer) Calton Hill in Edinburgh.  Showing off the splendid locations sometimes also has unintended comical effects, though.  We get that Clementine Churchill, as her husband’s helpmate/nanny/conscience, is always reliably on hand to sort things out.  Because Teplitzky is keen to emphasise the huge physical scale of interiors as well as exteriors, Clemmie’s instant materialisation in them, as soon as she’s required, is supernatural.

    Brian Cox often looks right – his make-up is designed by Cate Hall, the costumes by Bartholomew Cariss – and occasionally suggests a commemorative statue in the making.  He is too conscious, however, that playing Churchill is a big deal:  I wasn’t convinced that the aura of self-approval that clings to him was part of his characterisation rather than an expression of the actor’s confidence that he’s giving us a masterclass.  A sequence in which Churchill kneels at his bedside to say his prayers is typical.  He soon shifts from petitionary to declamatory mode, preferring the sound of his own voice to communing with God; he ends not with ‘Thy will be done’ but ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’.  The line may be Glendower’s but Brian Cox gives the distinct impression that Churchill is his King Lear.  Cox doesn’t just imitate Churchill’s famous vocal rhythms – he seems to be speechifying throughout.  As a result, the climactic radio address on the evening of D-Day isn’t as stirring as it might be:  it’s more of the same.

    Miranda Richardson is admirable:  her carriage and gestures give Clementine a welcome individuality; in their verbal skirmishes, she strikes a well-judged balance between a strong sense of duty, exasperation and regretful disenchantment with her petulant, otherwise-engaged husband.   Most of the supporting acting is par for the course although John Slattery and Danny Webb both play intelligently.  I liked Steven Cree in the small role of a military captain who gives the Allied high command crucial weather forecasts for the English Channel.  James Purefoy is a surprisingly imposing and fleshy George VI.  He and Churchill have an interminable conversation in which the latter is eventually dissuaded from having them both embark for Normandy together – and the interminability isn’t down to the king’s speech impediment.

    18 June 2017

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