Maybe more than any film this year, the first scene of Amy plays as a perfect advertisement of coming attractions. A group of middle school girls are at a birthday party. They’re playing with a camcorder, taunting the person behind the camera about a lollipop. They’re snarky and a little bit annoying, exactly as middle school girls should be. And then one of these girls steps away from the others, so she’s alone in the camcorder frame. She looks into the camera, opens her mouth, and starts singing “Happy Birthday.” And all of a sudden she’s Amy Winehouse.
I was in high school when Back To Black came out. I was the first Amy Winehouse fan among my friends. I still remember where I was—on a pit stop coming back from my post-grad senior week—when news came in that she had died. I remember the tabloids, the morning news reports, the paparazzi photos that this movie wants to condemn. I remembered walking into my press screening visualizing what she had looked like at her skinniest. I remember being aware while she was alive that she would die.
Asif Kapadia’s retelling of Amy Winehouse’s life is a film designed for people like me. It has a strong perspective on Winehouse, and the footage that Kapadia has included is extraordinary. His isn’t the first genius junkie documentary—notably, HBO released Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck this year, a similar rise and fall of a troubled star compiled out of home videos, interviews, and commercial footage.
But what Amy has over films like Montage Of Heck is in the nature of the footage itself. Both films owe their most extraordinary moments not to the most extraordinary moments of their icon’s iconic lives, but instead from interactions that were they alive, it seems unlikely that they would even remember. We watch Winehouse and Cobain alike in mundane scenes from her/his life, from the perspective of the people in the room, staring with the camera from the place where their eyes would be. But unlike Kurt Cobain, who belongs to a different era of personal documentation, Winehouse is of the digital age, and Kapadia’s footage of her spans beyond her time in the public eye. Where the private footage we see of Cobain is mitigated through his post-fame awareness of the fickle nature of the camera, pre-fame Winehouse looks back through the camera and into our eyes without irony.
At least for the first third of the film, as we get reacquainted with this spectral vision of Winehouse, she’s not famous—she’s just a girl. She treats the camera not as an intruder but as a friend, touring her apartment for us, complimenting our hair, making conspiratory eye contact in crowded rooms. She trusts the camera and it feels like she’s trusting us.
Kapadia has made it clear both in the film and in interviews that he has a profound respect for Winehouse’s musicianship, he’s invested in undoing the damage done by the tabloids to Winehouse’s public image, and he seems interested in condemning us for demanding she hand herself over to public life in the first place.
Once Winehouse becomes famous, the conspiratory nature of the camera changes. Where we had once occupied the intimate view of Winehouse’s loved ones, once things begin to unravel, we are pushed into the cameras of the ravenous paparazzi. Where Amy started the film unfiltered, offering herself to the camera and us readily, by the middle we’re attacking her as she tries to hide, her giant face slipping out of close-up and into a wide angle that exposes her tiny body. By the end, she’s pointing at us, ordering us away, refusing to perform for us anymore. Our bond has been broken and as the interviews with tearful friends and family remind us, it’s our fault.
In one way, this is a noble stab at indicting us, we voracious consumers of pop culture inanity. We’re indistinguishing in our hunger, devouring the private moments of strangers as if they were our own until there’s nothing left of the people we once claimed to love but a shell.
Kapadia also takes stabs at Winehouse’s father, Mitch Winehouse, for abandoning his family when Winehouse was a child, for not pushing her into rehab soon enough as an adult, and for continuing to keep his daughter on tour as she deteriorated. Kapadia turns a critical eye on Winehouse’s husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, for enabling her drug use with his own, and in a vaguely less tabloid-ready manner, Kapadia scorns Winehouse’s manager, Raye Cosbert, for scheduling concerts Winehouse didn’t want to perform.
But you know what? Fuck this movie anyway.
Am I saying this is a bad movie? No. It might even be a great movie. But fuck it for being good, because everything that makes it a “good” and “effective” documentary only makes it more invasive.
I sat in a theater of critics—not fans, not paying customers—who gasped in all the right places, who audibly wept through Winehouse’s deterioration, who clapped at the end of the film as what we knew would come did come, as Kapadia and the film all but announced that the cause of death was a fatal cocktail of heroin, alcohol, and celebrity.
Our suspicions had been confirmed. We listened to her songs and thought, “What a lively, funny, smart genius artist this Amy Winehouse must be!” And Kapadia proved us right. We watched her spiral down through drugs and thought the end was coming. And it was. We wondered who was responsible, and Kapadia showed us. It had been a sad experience, but also a satisfying one. And if the camera had seemed a little accusatory, it was just penance for our sins.
Amy in the end isn’t about Amy Winehouse at all; it’s all about us. It seems that in the absence of a current star in decline, we have to get our death fetish fulfilled elsewhere. Between Winehouse, Cobain, and the soon to come Chris Farley film, it looks like troubled star documentaries have become the new fix, the replacement drug for the hit we really want. We get to relive the triumph and the tragedy. We get to fall in love with Amy and we get to destroy her all at once. It’s the total package, the perfect movie experience. It’s documentary as porn: Amy looks into our eyes and we get off on how real it is.