Amy Winehouse and her friend Juliette Ashby (A24)
Breaking out of the standard documentary talking head model, director Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna was made up entirely of film footage of the late driver’s career. Imagine a film about Amy Winehouse that consisted only of fan footage taken of her during her tumultuous final years?
That’s not quite the approach that Kapadia takes with AMY, which adds interviews and other footage to the contemporary record, but this portrait of the troubled singer is also a sad look at the development of an increasingly saturated and invasive media. Just as innocent home movies capture her early life and promise, her very public breakdown happened just as home movies became not something you made with a cumbersome video camera that you brought out for special occasions, but with the phone that’s always in your pocket. With shaky smartphone footage of erratic concert performances, images of her and Blake looking wasted, shots of the couple being stalked by paparazzi, this music documentary at times comes off like a found footage horror movie.
But this was real life, for as long as it lasted. The film’s narrative is straightforward, opening with a birthday party and ending with the singer’s death in 2011. The birthday party seems like typical VHS-era footage of teenagers having fun; but when little Amy’s big voice belts out “Happy Birthday,” you hear a bittersweet hint of what’s to come.
That would be fame and all its unfortunate trappings. Winehouse wasn’t one of those precocious talents who if you asked them if they were going to be a star would confidently say hell yeah. In footage of the pre-breakout singer, she has no expectation of fame, and in fact seems wary of it. Hers wasn’t a prepackaged image; when an interviewer for AP makes the claim that Dido’s most recent album was used to “clean out her emotional closet, Winehouse’s reaction, “Did she?” is dryly hilarious, and as the interviewer continues, the singer just looks at her suspiciously and starts picking her teeth, barely disguising her contempt for entertainment media.
The film’s early sequences show the singer coming into her own, her smoky jazz-singer voice becoming a conduit for frank originals that very well did tap her emotional closet, but with a defiance that made it less like navel-gazing and more like dark melodrama. Live performances are cut with shots of handwritten lyrics from her notebooks, showing an artist who may have lost control of her personal life but was for a time in complete control of her gift. If her Billie Holiday/Sarah Vaughan-inspired phrasings seemed a little affected, she took great care with her phrasing, at least at first, making sure you knew she meant every word.
This isn’t just a music documentary, but a tragedy. As fame takes her almost as if by surprise, the demons descended; although Winehouse had friends who were concerned about her substance abuse—an early attempt to send her to rehab was abandoned, which left many wondering “What if?”—she was also surrounded by enablers, in the form of her boyfriend/husband Blake and even her own father. Mitch Winehouse, who has threatened to sue the filmmakers, comes off terribly, as a father who ignored his daughter when she was a girl and only took interest once she became a gravy train. He even brought a camera crew along to shoot his own reality show to a Caribbean island where Winehouse had gone in an attempt to retreat from the spotlight.
The camera that lovingly captured the young singer became an instrument of torture, especially in the hands of paparazzi that swoop down upon the couple with blinding flashes. AMY is a tragic look at the downfall of a young talent, and a troubling look at how this downfall became a form of lurid entertainment that threatens to overshadow her music.
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AMY
Directed by Asif Kapadia
With Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, Tony Bennett.
Rated R for language and drug material
Running time 128 minutes
Opens today at AMC Loews Georgetown, E Street landmark Cinema, AMC Hoffman, Regal Ballston, ArcLight Bethesda, AMC Shirlington, Angelika Mosaic, AMC Tysons Corner and Rave Fairfax Corner
