Kym Balthazar Fetsko
Near the end of the documentary Amy, the troubled pop star Amy Winehouse records a duet with Tony Bennett. She is subdued, apparently sober — and impatient. She was an ardent Bennett fan, but in the studio with him, she can’t record a take she likes. Bennett is warm and supportive, and in his presence she looks girlish, shy, respectful. The sequence is moving because we know, too well, that a few months after this 2011 session, she died of alcohol poisoning at age 27.
The film provides ample, painful evidence that her life was in chaos. She struggled with drugs, alcohol and bulimia. The paparazzi hounded her. Amid her difficulties, she canceled shows and melted down onstage. But in the Bennett sequence, we see an exacting artist applying her skill. Her voice was a remarkable instrument, and being in the studio with her idol seems to inspire her to work hard. “She was a natural, a true jazz singer,” Bennett says.
An accomplished, devastating film, Amy was directed by Asif Kapadia, whose previous feature documentary, Senna, chronicled another too-brief life, that of Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna. In Amy, Kapadia combines off-screen interviews with footage from Winehouse’s life. We hear from her mother and father and her soft-spoken husband, Blake Fielder. Friends share tearful remembrances. We hear from Nick Shymansky, Winehouse’s first manager, who remarks on her capriciousness: “She could make you feel so important, and then so unimportant,” he says.
Winehouse had a complex relationship with jazz. At the beginning of the film, we hear an early recording of her singing “Moon River” with Britain’s National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and she cites jazz singers like Bennett and Dinah Washington as influences. But later she declared jazz elitist, and she embraced a robust retro-soul sound on her breakthrough work, the 2006 album Back to Black.
She was a gifted, inventive lyricist, and Kapadia pays fitting attention to her songwriting. When her songs are played, her words flash on the screen. The camera lingers over verses she scrawled in notebooks. She says, ominously, “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head and I need to get it out.” At one point, Winehouse utters a throwaway line about her writing craft — and it lingers with me: “You have to remember what his neck smells like.” There is a paradox here. Addicts tend not to be good at self-examination, but Winehouse clearly knew how to draw on vivid experiences for her songs about disappointment, uncertainty, defiance. Given her songwriting prowess, I’m disappointed that over the course of this 128-minute film, we don’t hear one song in its entirety.
Her best-known song was the jaunty single “Rehab.” Its lyrics seemed impish and funny in 2006: “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no.” Now they make us cringe, because Amy mainly is a film about addiction and its horrific costs. At one point Winehouse describes her first apartment, and the freedom of living on her own. “I could get up and smoke weed all day,” she says gleefully, and that also makes us cringe. We learn when she first tried crack. We note the first mention, in passing, of heroin. At one point she spent six months on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, and there was good news: She didn’t do crack or heroin. The bad news? “Give her a free bar, and of course she’s going to drink,” someone says of the trip. The film’s high point is the 2008 Grammy ceremony, where she received five awards. She had signed a contract with her record label stipulating that she needed to be sober for the event. At a concert venue in London, she beams as she watches the proceedings on TV. But in an interview, a friend recalls that Winehouse took her aside that night and said, “This is so boring without drugs.”
Kapadia and his interview subjects examine Winehouse’s life for clues to her addiction. The pressure of fame is blamed, and it looks awful. Also blamed: the circumstances of her childhood in North London, and especially the influence of her father, Mitch. He is presented as the villain of this story, along with her enabling manager, Raye Cosbert. In fact, Mitch does seem as interested in promoting his own career as his daughter’s.
But at one point Mitch says, “You can’t force someone into treatment,” and he’s right. I think he is meant to sound defeatist at best, cynical and manipulative at worst, but it’s actually the film’s most potent insight. Even if Amy Winehouse had spent more time in rehab, it might not have saved her.
