“AMY” THE DOCUMENTARY

This is a devastating and haunting documentary about the tragedy and beauty of Amy Winehouse’s young life and tragic early death. Directed by Asif Kapadia, who made the acclaimed Ayrton Senna documentary, I understand that it took him months to break the vow of silence that her very close friends had taken when she died. The result is a heartbreaking collection of footage that he has pieced together using the backbone of her music to tell the story.

It is a fascinating film of an extraordinarily talented, but flawed character. Seeing the way she wrote her lyrics in her pretty handwriting was very moving – she had a very unique style, taking her personal stories and turning them into songs. Although there still is no question that we are simply watching a car crash waiting to happen and it makes for uncomfortable watching. Towards the end it is harrowing to watch and the worst of it is that because it is so soon after her death we are all somehow made to feel culpable. Each and every one of us who wanted a piece of her, who talked about how awful her performances were, who read about her hospital admittances, her pubic meltdowns, some of us even went to a show where she was booed off the stage because she was so off her head on drink and drugs – how could we have let this happen?

The tragedy of it all was she clearly had a mental illness from a very early age. She was on anti-depressants and was bulimic and not enough was done to help. As Stephen Fry said recently, if you are bipolar then drugs of some nature are required when you are down to make you feel “normal”. Amy clearly had a massive self-destruct button and ultimately we are all responsible for ourselves, but there were key points, made clear in the documentary where she became lost to those who loved her. Had she not met Blake Fielder-Civil, would things have been different? Or would she have found another addict who could enable her addictions? Her mother doesn’t feature very much and where is her brother Alex? What happened to him? No mention at all as far as I recall.

The presentation of the facts are understandably a massive blow to her father Mitch who has accused the director of being “a fucking disgrace”. Well he would say that. He thought that Amy dealt with his affair and subsequent abandonment of his family well. This is not how it is portrayed in the film and whilst they clearly loved each other very deeply, some of his decisions in pushing her forward and keeping her in the public eye instead of agreeing that she needed to go into rehab are deeply questionable.

I cried for most of the second half. The last song had the whole audience in tears. We all wish that something more could have been done for her before she went the same way at 27 as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Curt Cobain. But perhaps when music is your life, when you have found an outlet for your depression that works but only with drugs, perhaps when you are a tortured artist, nothing was going to change her path. Without the drugs, she found life boring. Maybe nothing could have stopped her. It is so rare these days to find such a “fucked up” rock star. All the bands these days are clean living – look at Taylor Swift – she was such a songbird rarity that I don’t think anyone knew what to do with her.

There are many moving scenes and being a fly on the wall of her sitting room listening to her sing the most extraordinary version of “Happy Birthday” as a young teen made you realise early on that she was destined for great things. That huge voice was there from the start and she knew it. The sadness is that she was happiest as a jazz singer in a small club. That is where she should have stayed instead of becoming mainstream and uber famous. She was without question hounded and she hated it. She was lost. Her true friends had abandoned her in an effort to try “tough love”. It didn’t work, she just felt even more abandoned.

Tony Bennett described her in the film as “one of the truest jazz singers I every heard. Up there with Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and certainly the documentary made me feel the same. He said if he’d known he would have told her to “slow down” – that life tells you how you need to live it if you can hang around long enough. She was extraordinary. But this film is too soon, too raw and desperately haunting. As is so often the case her mental health issues were not addressed and by the time she became hugely famous too many people wanted her on the road.

This is a documentary that everyone should see and I certainly hope that many of us will learn from it. She is a complex character who needed love, found it in all the wrong places and then was thrown to the wolves. She comes out of it well – she’s funny, clever and vulnerable. What is there not to love? Ultimately only she could take responsibility for her own life, not even her controlling father could control her addictions, but watching this, I felt like we all had a part to play in her demise and that is shameful.