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.

Love and Mercy (4/5 Stars)

(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)

“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt psychiatrist.

It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson, gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry. The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.

Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves. Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now.  Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew” while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things. Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one day as he shops for a new car. The movie hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation. Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?

I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety, morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I think she should get an Oscar nomination for it. 

Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He was right.