There are a lot of reasons to cry during a film, I guess. The last one that engulfed me in tears was Inside Out, where a little girl’s emotional journey in navigating a series of pre-teen life changes saw her say goodbye to friends both real and imagined and come to accept her existence in an less-idealised reality in which complexity and uncertainty mingle with love and family. I wept buckets.
But the tears I shed during Asif Kapadia’s (Senna) film were for a different reason. Here too, Amy is a story of a girl’s journey in navigating a series of post-teen life changes in which she leaves behind the safety of childhood friends and well-intentioned supporters for a more volatile, complex and ultimately, utterly destructive set of influences - some human, and some chemical.
For various reasons - mostly my own musical preferences at the time - I hadn’t paid too much attention to Amy Winehouse, except for the things thrust upon me by the media and its never-ending fascination with her public image. I could hum the verses to “Rehab”, I suppose, but I admit the hooky 50’s/60’s R&B stylings were a little gauche for my liking and I investigated no further. But having now seen footage of her singing relatively unaccompanied, effortlessly drawing words across bar-lines with phrasing and emphasis that makes it clear Tony Bennett’s unsentimental comparisons to Ella and Sarah may have been well-founded had she lived to record more material, perhaps I should have been easier on her and looked a bit deeper.
And yet in watching the film - I say “a film” but really, it felt more like observing a two hour post-mortem - giving her an easier time and looking below the surface was what I wanted those who came to be profoundly complicit in her sad, slow and very-public demise to do more of. Her father, Mitch, (who carried out a very public campaign against the film and his portrayal in it) comes across as either completely naive and mis-guided or completely self-interested and the worst sort of deindividuated individual captivated by fame not of one’s own making. Amy’s husband Blake Fielder-Civil comes off no better, if not worse. After admitting introducing her to heroin and crack, being sent to prison on unrelated charges and then divorcing her, he appears in a segment of a TV show (“Amy Winehouse: The Untold Story") extolling himself as the victim in the relationship and declaring himself better off without her. Alongside some dubious management choices to send her back on the road and continue to milk Back to Black’s success rather than produce and record new material, intercut with the media’s constant invasive and fetishised fascination with her personal instability, it’s hard not to ask who the hell was looking out for her when she was at her most vulnerable. (A Terry Richardson photo shoot that seemingly celebrates all that is good about drugged-up lovers on the edge of self-destruction was particularly difficult to stomach.)
Having said that, the film neither makes light of Winehouse’s pre-fame bulimia, the medication for depression and segue into other forms of self-medication, nor her ability to self-sabotage the things and people that sought to add some semblance of normality once the fame and the money kicked in. With a passive mother and an absent father, clearly, here was a girl completely unprepared for the attention she would garner, though her voice and songwriting clearly warranted it. Desperate to be loved, and if not loved, then willing to settle for the neuro-chemical equivalent, Amy is a portrait of an artist whose inability to make personal choices concomitant with her prodigious talent gave us all an excuse to marvel at her artistry, even as we stood by and watched it implode in gratuitous fashion at the hands of those who claimed to love her, captured by an incessant media presence only too willing to exploit it for tabloid inches.
It’s always difficult to recommend a film, especially one as emotionally difficult to digest as this one. But that makes it no less brilliant. If anything, it makes is all the more essential.
