Amy

Amy Wine­house died an unnat­ur­al death aged 27 and her image 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 height­ened drama­ti­sa­tion, you need only have read the news­pa­pers dur­ing the last five years of her life. Fans of her music are primed for an antidote.

Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, puffed-up melo­dra­ma is some­thing that Asif Kapa­dia opts to expand on with his engross­ing but some­what point­less exer­cise in retrac­ing the high­lights and low­lights of a pub­lic fig­ure already bogged down in hyper­bol­ic pro­jec­tions. As with the director’s wild­ly suc­cess­ful Sen­na from 2010, Amy ben­e­fits from the production’s wealth of access. Present is every­thing from inside source stuff – voice­mail mes­sages and hand­writ­ten lyrics – to per­for­mances, video footage and tabloid pho­tos. Basi­cal­ly, all the fat sucked from the body of a woman who came to know no privacy.

The doc­u­men­tary begins 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 less steady hands this mate­r­i­al would like­ly be a slur­ry of non­sense. Instead it is buoyed by sharp focus and churn­ing 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.

The film takes a dim view of the paparazzi, who staked her day and night. Father, Mitch, pre­sent­ed as some­thing of a bum­bling oaf, is shown bring­ing a cam­era crew to her pri­vate St Lucia bolt­hole dur­ing a peri­od of con­va­les­cence to film an oppor­tunis­tic Chan­nel 4 real­i­ty show. The mes­sage: behold 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 dra­mat­ic beats. 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 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.

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 in when Amy sings, when her wicked humour and sin­cere pas­sion is cap­tured 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 exam­ined a more eso­teric slice of her life, we might have come away with a more inti­mate por­trait that mer­it­ed such a famil­iar title.