Amy (4/5 Stars)

I remember the first time I heard an Amy Winehouse song. Like most people it was “Rehab” and perhaps like most people the song made me laugh. Surely it was a sort of tough guy joke like the T-shirt slogan, “AA is for quitters.” But according to this documentary, Amy’s manager really tried to get her to go to rehab and she really said no. And as the song goes, “I ain’t got the time- and if my Daddy’s thinks I’m fine- they tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go go go,” that too happened. Amy made a deal with the manager that if her father wanted her to go, she would. Amy sat down on her father’s lap, acted all cheerful, told him she was fine, and he agreed that she did not have to go to rehab. In fact, she fired her long time manager and hired her then publicist for the same job. A publicist has a conflict of interest of course in that they make their money by keeping the star out on the road and by necessity out of rehab whereas a manager is paid simply to take care of the star. I could compose a lot of paragraphs like that one in this movie which is a series of bad luck, missed chances, and human failings along the way to a sad and premature death. 

There is a lot of talk of blame for the death of Amy Winehouse at that infamous age of rock star death, 27. And there certainly is a lot of blame to go around. This documentary is very much a postmortem search for why in this day and age of everybody knowing everything about everybody we could not help one with loads of promise and money. We can talk about her clueless family, her sketchy boyfriend/husband, the insanely intrusive paparazzi, and many other things. But at the end of the day I think we can also say that Amy Winehouse made great art that was informed by self-destructive tendencies. Her story is a tragic one in that what made her great also caused her downfall. In this way she is not so different from Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain who also died of drug related causes at the same age (I don’t know enough about Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix to say they had self-destructive tendencies). Perhaps the biggest revelation of this movie is how exactly personal all of her songs were. This is a revelation in this day and age because the music industry is so very manufactured. We no longer think of a break up song as a song really about a break up but as a crowd-sourced focus grouped image of a lowest common denominator version of a break up. But the entire album of “Back to Black” was literally about a bad breakup. And when Amy Winehouse said-

“I cheated myself-

Like I knew I would-

I told you I was trouble-

You know that I’m no good.”

-it is hard to believe that she meant it. But she did. She meant everything she said. And it was dark and sad, and cut and hurt. These elements mixed with an excellent competence made it great. But because of the former I think it is fair to say she never thought that it would make her so rich and famous given that popular trend in music of fake fake fake.

It is a shame we treated her like a punchline. Perhaps, like me, the majority of people never considered that someone would hang such dirty laundry out in public for everybody to see. It must have been incredibly humiliating. Perhaps she should not have done it. Perhaps she should have sung at a mirror in a closet. If Amy Winehouse could have survived, I imagine it would be by pulling a J.D. Salinger and simply disappearing off the face of the Earth. Otherwise she would have to compromise her art and I don’t think she would have found it possible to do that.

This documentary is very much in sympathy with Amy. Given that she grew up with the almost ubiquitous amount of video cameras around we see quite a lot of her befor she was famous. These glimpses do not provide a definition of a person as much as they nod to any even more mysterious and complex personality unseen. One person described her as someone who would try very hard to make you feel special and then ignore you and break your heart. Was she one kind of person or the other, both or neither. We don't know. She had a great jazz voice and she admired many artists that very few (and none her age) were paying attention to anymore. One of the best moments in the film is her reaction to seeing Tony Bennett on a stage to hand out an award that she will go on to win. Her eyes go wide in awe of his presence. The guy is like eighty years old. Nobody else in the room seems to care about him. There is another great moment that provokes a good laugh when her independent and truth telling spirit come out in an interview. An interviewee’s asserts that Tori Amos puts as much truth and emotion as she does in her music and Amy Winehouse shows a knee jerk contempt for the comment. She shows bad manners for sure but I think we can all agree that she is correct. Like Kurt Cobain, her appearance on the scene was a perfect combination of pure talent and raw emotion that cut the competition to shreds.

If you want to pick out the biggest mistake I think it would be her marriage to the boyfriend that broke her heart and inspired the album, “Back to Black.” His name was Blake and for a year they got drunk, and loved, and cheated on each other. Then he broke up with her and she wrote and produced the biggest album in the world. Now rich and famous she shows up at his door again. A couple months later they are married. Does this sound familiar to my American friends? Perhaps you’ve read “The Great Gatsby.” This is the same mistake Fitzgerald wrote about. No you can’t play pretend and rewrite the past. There was probably some golden moment when they were in love and super high that she kept trying to recapture. That is what addiction is all about I’ve heard. Trying to recapture the feeling of the first time you were high. And the tragedy is you can’t recapture that feeling no matter how many drugs you do. Getting clean (and growing up) is about admitting defeat and moving on. But Amy died before she could do that.

p.s. It is amazing that this documentary got the full blessing of the family of Amy Winehouse as it is so clearly critical of their behavior. But it also makes sense, as the movie’s main charge towards them is a tremendous naivete towards the precarious condition of Amy. It seems her parents took part in the film because they did not seem to fully grasp how bad they would look in it. That would certainly explain her father’s choice to bring a reality film crew to visit his still in rehab daughter in the Caribbean over Amy’s obvious discomfort with the cameras. It apparently never occurred to him that his daughter was being negatively affected by fame. Amazing.