Stripped Down: Amy (Film Review)
A new documentary about the late singer Amy Winehouse, Amy (
) interrogates the tragic side of performance and public identity. Directed by Asif Kapadia, a filmmaker known for the 2010 biography Senna, the movie earnestly charts Winehouse’s rise from early adolescence in London’s suburbs to the crushing pressure of worldwide acclaim, accompanied by the drug addictions that ultimately killed her at 27.
Amy opens with home-video footage from 1998, at a birthday party. Winehouse and her friends are horsing around, as teens always do, when suddenly: that voice. It’s like a hot knife through butter. As she belts “Happy Birthday” to the camera, her undeniable gift unleashed, everything else fades. It’s the birth of a music legend. Amy isn’t a hagiography, very far from it, but it never hesitates to laud Winehouse’s talent.
Much like Senna, Kapadia doesn’t rely on a conventional documentary style to tell this story. Instead, he pairs footage of the singer with recorded testimonies of friends, family, and colleagues. It’s an eerie decision, forcing the audience to trust unseen voices while watching intimate home videos — it places a tremendous amount of narrative control in Kapadia’s capable hands — but more often than not, it seems to be an honest way to capture Winehouse’s prodigious, awful legacy.
Amy is an indictment: of Winehouse’s ex-husband, Blake Fielder, who introduced her to crack cocaine; of her father, Mitch Winehouse, who told her she didn’t need to go to rehab; and of the tabloid media, which ravenously covered her fatal descent into booze and drugs. “We did everything in our power to help Amy,” Mitch says. “I felt it was Amy’s responsibility to get well.” The movie’s response? It seethes.
The triumph of Amy is Winehouse’s wit and charm away from the microphone. She’s shown to be whip-smart, a wily thinker with little patience for nonsense. Again and again, Kapadia uses Winehouse’s own words to frame the irony of her career. “If I really thought I was famous,” she says. “I’d go and top myself or something because it’s a frightening thing.”
Winehouse died four years ago. Kapadia’s documentary is one of the first major attempts to define her legacy. If only for that reason, it’s worth seeing, even if several questions remain. Is this an authoritative story? Is it too voyeuristic, like the tabloids it criticizes? Could Winehouse have been saved? And most of all: what if she had been?
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