On its surface Whitney: Can I Be Me, which screens this weekend at the Siskel Center as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival, is a documentary about pop star Whitney Houston, the phenomenally talented singer whose career was cut short at age 48 when, under the influence of a variety of drugs, she accidentally drowned in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2012. But for its first hour Whitney employs Houston’s life story as the basis of a fascinating and complex examination of identity.
After the first hour Broomfield and Dolezal elect to focus on Houston’s substance abuse and the collapse of her relationships with Brown and Crawford, less interesting subjects that slow the documentary’s momentum. One wonders why the filmmakers didn’t keep trying to solve the nature of Houston’s identity—with such a complicated life, perhaps they could only get so far. v
Directed by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal
