“Amy” ends. The credits roll, but no one stirs. Instead, we sit, myself and roughly a dozen others, with our eyes fixed on the screen. It’s hard to describe what we have just witnessed, and, I figure, that’s why we remain seated. We are attempting to process director Asif Kapadia's gripping biography of a gifted, young woman and her subsequent decline.
Corroded by an all-too-familiar combination of fame, drugs and alcohol, the Amy we met at film's beginning — a ruddy-cheeked teenager with an unearthly voice — becomes, towards the film’s end, a sallow-cheeked addict, struggling to cope with the success wrought by that unearthly voice.
"Amy" is unique, for very rarely does a documentary chronicle a person’s decline with such precision or depth. It must be noted, though, that the film's success in this regard has as much to do with the person standing in front of the camera, Ms. Winehouse, as it has to do with those standing behind it.
Though edited and assembled by Kapadia, the film is largely comprised of private videos and photographs. Thus, when facing the camera, Winehouse is more often than not facing a family member or a friend rather than a stranger. Appropriately, it is her family and friends who narrate the film. In this way, we can see Winehouse as she naturally was. We can see her as Amy — a relative, a friend — rather than as Amy Winehouse, the pop-star, the addict.
Fortunately, beneath that pop persona, the film presents us with an immensely likeable person. Incredibly frank and equally loquacious, Winehouse is also rather funny. Whether she is playfully rolling her eyes at an interviewer's trite remark or conducting a tour of her hotel room in a faux Italian accent, Winehouse manages to inject humor into many of the situations in which we see her.
Unfortunately, this humor dissipates further into the film. The further Winehouse moves from her humble beginnings playing at small jazz clubs — the further she moves towards fame — the less humorous the film becomes.
At the start of the second half of the film, for instance, Winehouse is on the precipice of stardom, in a studio booth, recording songs for her second and final record, “Back to Black.” She has recently been dumped by Blake Fielder — whom she will later marry and, shortly thereafter, divorce — has begun to drown those postpartum sorrows in alcohol and, in addition, has returned to the bulimic tendencies of her adolescence. On the precipice of stardom, she is on the precipice of self-destruction. Then, all of a sudden, fame.
Somewhat predictably, the windfall from this album’s breakout single “Rehab,” the fame as well as the lucre, serves to foreshadow the singer’s subsequent downfall. However, Winehouse does go on to experience certain highs.
In 2008, for example, her idol Tony Bennett presented her with the Grammy for Record of the Year. Of all the scenes in the movie, this is the most poignant, for as elated as she is initially, Winehouse later told a friend that the win — a moment she had long hoped for — ultimately felt boring, lifeless without drugs.
If fame facilitated her descent into drug addiction, however, it no less caused certain people — Winehouse’s manager, for example, and, surprisingly, her father — to overlook such a descent. Couple their negligence with Winehouse and Fielder's drug-fueled relationship and, suddenly, one recognizes how inevitable her death was.
This is perhaps the reason that we, the audience, had remained seated as the credits rolled. Kapadia’s devastating yet brilliant film had shown us not only the path that Amy followed to her death, but that her path was largely inescapable. It seems that we, ourselves, were trying to escape on her behalf, trying to find a silver lining to such a tragic tale. In the end, though, the screen sadly went to black.
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