An unflinching eye on Amy Winehouse
Amy Winehouse documentary details devastating price of fame
A moment in “Amy,” the documentary about retro-soul singer Amy Winehouse, seems to capture her: It’s beautiful, sad and haunting. Winehouse wins the 2008 Grammy for record of the year, and the look on her face moves from shock to awe, beaming happiness to slight sadness. She’s hugged tightly by her mother and seems, for a moment, like a nervous little girl. Tony Bennett, one of her mentors, presents the award, which adds to the luster.
Winehouse, who was appearing via satellite because of visa issues, won five awards that night for her breakthrough album “Back to Black.” She looks healthy; she was clean and sober at that point, according to “Amy” director Asif Kapadia.
“That moment is a little window into who she was,” Kapadia says. It also cemented her stardom for many U.S. fans.
“Amy” unravels the mystery behind the beehive and winged eyeliner, the story beyond “Back to Black” and tabloid headlines — while still taking all of those elements into account. It opens Friday in Houston. Kapadia, who directed a 2010 documentary about Brazilian motor-racing champion Ayrton Senna, started working on “Amy” just a year after Winehouse died of accidental alcohol poisoning in July 2011. She was 27 years old.
Winehouse never performed in Houston; Austin’s South by Southwest festival was as close as she came.
“I think, in one way, her success and her downfall was just like a quirk of timing. It’s like this weird thing that happened because of that moment in time,” Kapadia says.
“Her record originally was really used as the soundtrack for a lot of other people. People like Britney (Spears) were having emotional breakdowns in public. ‘Rehab’ was the song that went everywhere around the world. That song was used by TV channels when they’d talk about Britney and other people having breakdowns. Paris Hilton used to talk about her a lot.”
Indeed, Winehouse’s music and her image became intertwined with tabloid culture. She engaged listeners with her throwback sound but quickly became the butt of cruel jokes. She was, particularly in England, the face of the 24-hour news cycle propelled by social media.
Kapadia uses paparazzi footage throughout the film, and it’s often difficult to watch. The wave of flashes and clicks and cries of “Amy!” is overwhelming, a negative energy that circled her every move. It’s the same intense crush, orchestrated or not, that pervades the lives of Spears, Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashians and Amanda Bynes.
“It’s visceral. You can feel how it’s painful,” Kapadia says. “That isn’t a fun situation to be in — and that’s if you’re grounded and feeling well. If you’re not well, you can only imagine what it must have been like. It kind of almost explains why people might do things to numb the pain, to escape, to try and get away from it.”
Kapadia dives deep into Winehouse’s battles with drugs and alcohol. He conducted more than 100 interviews with some of her closest friends and family, including parents Mitch and Janis Winehouse, ex-manager Nick Shymanksy, ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, bodyguard Andrew Morris and stars Bennett, Mos Def, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi — people who genuinely cared
about her.
“They were all suffering privately,” Kapadia says. “They were all in pain. They were all angry. There was a lot of guilt. There was a lot of paranoia about the media.
“It became very apparent they had to speak. They were desperate to speak. They were desperate for somebody to ask the right questions. It was making them sick, really, knowing this. And they were going a bit crazy because the world seems to just go with a certain consensus. Nobody really cared to look any deeper than the cliché.”
In gaining so much trust from so many key people, Kapadia was able to elevate “Amy” above the standard documentary trappings and into something greater — a stinging commentary on the perils of fame, the complexities of family, the pain of addiction. It, and Winehouse herself, feel even more relevant today.
Many of her lyrics — “Rehab,” “Love Is a Losing Game,” “Stronger Than Me” — scroll across the screen, telling the story in Winehouse’s own words.
“Amy’s voice is so powerful. The feelings, the raw emotion she evokes through her music, continue to both haunt and inspire me,” says Melissa Ragsdale Darragh, a Houston singer. “As a recovering addict, her struggle and pain is a reminder of how close I came to the same fate. When I watch her perform, it is a trigger because I can tell which performances she’s strung out in. And it takes me to a dark place in my past when I suffered, too. It’s real. It’s an experience we share.”
The film opened in limited release over the Fourth of July weekend, earning a whopping $222,500 on just six screens for a per-screen average of $37,083. It’s earned glowing reviews and is poised to be the biggest non-concert documentary in years. It also seems a lock for next year’s Academy Awards.
Winehouse’s family, particularly her father, Mitch, have since distanced themselves from the film, telling the Guardian “it is both misleading and contains some basic untruths.” Some of the revelations are indeed shocking, including her father’s resistance to placing Winehouse in rehab, which directly inspired the song; and her mother’s avoidance of confronting Winehouse about her worsening bulimia, which she began struggling with as a teenager.
Kapadia lets no one off the hook, whether it was because they felt helpless or didn’t want to stop the train that was carrying so many people.
“The more I found out and the more I learned, the more I felt, ‘We have to do this film.’ It’s actually about how we live now and how we take people who are amazing, build them up and tear them down,” Kapadia says.
“Nobody really knows who this girl is. Everyone thinks they know. Even if you say, ‘I have never read a tabloid in my life,’ you have an opinion of Amy, and it probably wasn’t a positive one. She’s really intelligent, really funny, really a brighteyed, amazing-looking person. And in a couple of years, it’s all changed. Why wasn’t somebody looking after her, protecting her? That was part of the reason I wanted to make the film: to try to see if I could, in any way, explain it to myself.”