Amy – first look review

The title sug­gests an inti­mate por­tray­al of a mega star. Amy Wine­house died an unnat­ur­al death aged 27 and is shroud­ed in a mytho­log­i­cal mist. To call a film sim­ply by her first name sug­gests a focus on her truest out­line. No more roman­ti­cised tragedy, no more exag­ger­at­ed sor­row, no more fix­a­tion on sex and drugs and jazz and soul. For a height­ened drama­ti­sa­tion of her life, you need only have read the news­pa­pers dur­ing the last five years of her life. How ready fans of her music are for an antidote.

Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, puffed-up melo­dra­ma is some­thing that Asif Kapa­dia – despite his immense sto­ry­telling skill – adds to rather than pierces with his engross­ing but some­what point­less exer­cise in retrac­ing the high and low­lights of a pub­lic fig­ure already bogged down in hyper­bol­ic pro­jec­tions. As with Kapadia’s wild­ly suc­cess­ful pre­vi­ous doc, Sen­na, Amy ben­e­fits from the production’s wealth of access. Present are every­thing from inside source stuff – voice­mail mes­sages and hand­writ­ten lyrics – to songs, per­for­mances, video footage, tabloid pho­tos, basi­cal­ly, all the fat sucked from the body of a woman who came to know no privacy.

The doc­u­men­tary starts with home video footage of Amy aged 14, muck­ing around with mates on the stair­case of a north Lon­don house. Her voice is as full as her face. Her face is dif­fer­ent to the one the world came to know. Bulim­ia was a com­pul­sion as dam­ag­ing to her as hero­in, crack and alco­hol addic­tions. In unearthing and pur­su­ing this fact of her life, Kapadia’s doc­u­men­tary does its best work.

The rest feels like oppor­tunis­tic sto­ry­telling. The team had access to oceans of raw data, a result of ​“two-and-a-half years of foren­sic research,” accord­ing to pro­duc­er, James Gay-Rees. In oth­er hands this mate­r­i­al would be a slur­ry of non­sense. Instead it is buoyed by sharp focus and con­sis­tent momen­tum. But what exact­ly was being foren­si­cal­ly researched? Not Amy’s inte­ri­or life. The film delights in writ­ing out the most omi­nous of her lyrics in flow­ery sub­ti­tles, but is only inter­est­ed in her trou­bles inso­far as they pro­vide con­nec­tive tis­sue to the next das­tard­ly event or per­son. She is the ener­gy source from which a melo­dra­ma can be pow­ered into life.

The film takes a dim view of the paparazzi that staked out her home and of her father, Mitch, who brought a cam­era crew to her St Lucian bolt­hole to film his Chan­nel 4 show, My Daugh­ter Amy. The mes­sage is: look at the buz­zards that sur­round­ed this poor woman. And yet it uses the mate­r­i­al served by these forces to inform a sophis­ti­cat­ed retelling of the same old irre­sistible plot points. Rather than try­ing to tun­nel inward, past music indus­try exploita­tion, fam­i­ly neg­li­gence, drug addic­tion and roman­tic trau­ma, the doc bounces off these ghoul­ish piv­ots. The por­tray­al of Amy Wine­house her­self is almost the neg­a­tive space in between the forces around her: a vic­tim that holds their imprints rather than any­one deep­er and more autonomous.

Blake Field­er-Civ­il, the love of Amy’s life and the man who first offered her hero­in is an easy per­son to vil­lainise. This film art­ful­ly oblig­es, using footage of him boast­ing about being a jack the lad that paves the way to dark­er insin­u­a­tions. A drug expert sug­gests that he may have want­ed to keep Amy addict­ed to crack and hero­in as she – now a rich star – enabled his access to sub­stances. No one’s say­ing that there was no murk­i­ness to their rela­tion­ship. Doc­u­men­tary evi­dence exists of his flaws. But it is a dis­ser­vice to Amy who loved Blake, deeply and poet­i­cal­ly, to sim­ply car­i­ca­ture him. The film’s dis­in­ter­est in the pow­er­ful emo­tions that shaped Amy’s choic­es is telling. Kapa­dia has his own nar­ra­tive agen­da and it is not deter­mined by his subject’s emo­tion­al landscape.

The gap between gawk­er and gawked at clos­es down when Amy sings, when her bru­tal humour is cap­tured and when her love of orig­i­nal music comes out, in words, in per­for­mances or in inter­ac­tions with her heroes. If only this film hadn’t been so des­per­ate to shoe­horn in all the dra­ma and had tak­en on a small­er or more eso­teric slice of her life, we might have come away with a more inti­mate por­trait that mer­it­ed such a famil­iar title.