(UK, 127 min.)
Dir. Asif Kapadia
Featuring: Amy Winehouse, Mitch Winehouse, Blake
Fielder-Civil, Juliette Ashby, Lauren Gilbert
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Amy Winehouse – Somerset House July 2007. Copyright: Rex
Features
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“Jules, this is so boring without drugs,” says Amy Winehouse
during one of the many heartbreaking moments of Amy, the tragic documentary about the short but significant life
and career of the British songstress. Amy Winehouse makes this sad lament for
sobriety at a time when she should be celebrating. As her friend, Juliette
Ashby, recounts in the film, Winehouse had just won a slew of Grammys including
Record of the Year for “Rehab,” and, ironically, the star pulled her friend
backstage and said that the night wasn’t the high it could have been since she
had to experience it through the dull lens of clear-headedness. “Rehab” best
defines the sad mass of contradictions that was the power and appeal of Amy
Winehouse, but this shrewd archival doc by Asif Kapadia (Senna) breaks down the myth of Amy Winehouse and shows audiences
how much they got her wrong.
“Rehab” remains the definitive Amy Winehouse song (although “Tears Dry on Their Own” is my personal favourite) in large part because it played
into the perception that the singer was a wild hot mess. Her booze-fuelled
concerts, notorious nights at the bars, and run-ins with paparazzi are stuff of
rock and rock lore. (She could probably drink Jim Morrison under the table.) Her
song was one of the definitive musical cues of 2007, especially for anyone at
university that time. I have fuzzy memories of getting hammered at parties and
swaying to “Rehab” with people I mostly know/remember through Facebook pictures
I've long since untagged, spilling drinks and singing along with, “They tried
to make me go to rehab, but I said ‘no, no, no’.” Plans for nights out included
texts asking how drunk people wanted to get on a scale of one to Amy Winehouse.
We loved Any Winehouse because her sultry, smoky voice was the life of the party
and an anthem for university age kids who loved to get shit-faced. We loved Amy
for her music and, especially, for the defiant hot mess we thought she was.
It’s hard to recover from Amy without having a slight sense of guilt that one essentially
killed Amy Winehouse by loving the slurring train wreck of her star persona. Kapadia
and editor Chris King take much of the footage that contributed to the Amy
Winehouse myth and they re-contextualize it using audio interviews with friends
and family that convey how much Winehouse struggled when she hit the peak of
fame. The film features old archival footage of Amy during her childhood and
teen years in which her talent and lust for life are plainly evident. She
looked like the life of the party, but the film shows how the party changed
over the course of her career.
Winehouse, a member of the infamous “27 Club” populated by
stars who died too soon, had a great voice and Amy shows her eclectic mix of jazz, pop, and soul with a range of
showstopping performances. Behind the scenes footage reveals her creative
process as she records songs like Back to
Black and the best excerpts of her concerts showcase an original voice that
was a force of nature. Amy tragically
portrays Winehouse as an unparalleled talent that fell short of her potential
with a tragic waste.
Amy features as much
footage of Winehouse battling the bottle as it does of her performing and
writing songs. These images rarely show Amy having a good time: she’s loaded to
the point of incoherence in some shots, while she’s violent and miserable in
others. Her addiction to drugs and her struggle with bulimia show a person who
lost control and never quite knew how to take care of herself: she went
straight from adolescence to stardom, and the accounts with her friends suggest
that she didn’t experience the same transition period they did in which they
learned to become adults. Winehouse continued to party, but with bigger and
better poisons that she could now afford.
This footage of Winehouse is to some extent limiting as Amy defines Winehouse as much by her
alcoholism as it does by her musical talent. This aspect of Winehouse’s persona
is admittedly inextricable since it shaped her life and work, but it also doesn’t
entirely erase the perception of Winehouse that existed in the public eye.
Instead of a hedonistic hot mess, however, Amy
presents Winehouse as a full-throttle rager with a death wish. The reliance on
archival footage does little new as it re-examines its subject from a variety
of sources (mostly low-res digital video) and while it’s flawlessly made, the
archival montage never quite approaches the phenomenal meta-meditation on Kurt
Cobain in this year’s Montage of Heck
nor does the limited scope of the film doesn't take Winehouse's story to the same level that
Liz Garbus does with the troubled Nina Simone in What Happened, Miss Simone?. Amy
hardly has a fault to its astute collage of a great, tortured talent, but it inevitably
leaves something to be desired in a year that already has some great docs about
musical geniuses elevating the art form.
The film really succeeds, though, as it culls through the
elements of media that contributed to Winehouse’s death. The film builds an
assaultive montage of villainous paparazzi flash bulbs that obscure the singer
as she tries to live a private life. Kapadia raises the volume of the cameras
to the volume of a beast and turns jokes about Winehouse’s addiction back on
the insensitivity of the talking heads, and Amy
argues that the public’s desire to feed on the mess of Winehouse’s life trapped
the singer in a self-destructive cycle she could not escape. The film puts the
onus of Winehouse’s death on all of us as it boldly implies that her death by alcohol
poisoning was on some level a suicide, for she hit the bottle a final time as
an escape from the all-consuming curse of celebrity. Amy heartbreakingly celebrates a talent lost too soon and
incisively cuts at the celebrity culture that makes victims of its own stars.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Amy screened at Cineplex
Lansdowne as part of the Cineplex Front Row Centre Events series.
It returns to Ottawa
at The ByTowne from August 16-18.
