‘Whitney’ Chronicles Houston’s Glorious Rise and Tragic Fall

John Hogan February 12, 2019, 9:00 am

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“The Greatest Love of All.” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” “I Will Always Love You.” Throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s, Whitney Houston‘s voice — smooth as silk, yet powerful as a Mack truck — helped define our lives and times, a notion not lost on director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland).

He delivers a moving documentary (which debuted in theaters in 2018 and now comes to Hulu) chronicling the singer’s glorious rise and tragic fall. “I went in to solve a mystery,” Macdonald notes. “How could the life of one of the most beautiful, talented and successful women of her generation end the way it did?”

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Houston’s more than two dozen Top 40 hits helped propel her into the pop music stratosphere. But her self-destructive behavior brought everything crashing down, culminating in her death in 2012 at the age of 48.

In the controversial film, loved ones, including the New Jersey native’s own siblings, reveal how her drug use, tempestuous marriage to R&B singer Bobby Brown and struggle to cope with alleged childhood molestation at the hands of a female cousin all plagued Houston.

For Macdonald, who spent 18 months making Whitney, they provided some answers, but the mystery remains unsolved. “She was always made to feel like an outsider,” he notes. “The theme of the film, in the end, is someone who was looking for a home but never found it.”