It’s hard to tell where Amy Winehouse left off and her problems began.
Cocaine, heroin and alcohol abuse were compounded by bulimia, daddy issues, depression and being consumed by a fame that was never under her control.
The more popular she became the worse things got, as the complex and compassionate documentary “Amy” portrays in excruciating and incremental detail.
Winehouse, who wore her problems publicly like the tattoos that covered her body, died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the age of 27. Like the Zapruder film, “Amy” leaves one in the uncomfortable position of knowing how things turn out and watching helplessly as the inevitable unfolds.
The film, by Asif Kapadia, is told chronologically and filled with archival footage from family and friends.
We watch her go from who she was – a vulnerable self-described “North London Jewish girl with a lot of attitude” surrounded by friends – to self-destructive spectacle whose lurch downhill was illuminated by the strobe light flashes of an army of paparazzi and covered by the tabloids like the deathwatch it became.
Whoever she once was became dwarfed by the magnitude of her success; her first album was nominated for a Mercury Prize, her second won five Grammy Awards including best song for the addictive epitaph “Rehab.”
She began as a jazz singer in the style of Sarah Vaughn or Dinah Washington. Tony Bennett, who collaborated with her just before her death, compared the purity of her voice to Ella Fitzgerald.
It would be puffery if we didn’t see and hear it for ourselves. Even in the earliest performance footage, accompanied by just a guitar, she showed vocal confidence, range and control, and her confessional lyrics had the intimacy and intricacy of poetry.
Such scenes make what happened next feel more tragic by comparison. We see her at her nadir, at a concert in Serbia, too drunk to perform.
Her life revolved around three relationships.
There was the daddy (who says she’s fine, in “Rehab”) who left the family when she was young. She spent her adult life trying to please him and he is protesting the film’s unflattering portrait of him as being part of the problem.
There was her first manager, who was also a protective close friend; she is seen smiling shyly in the back seat of his car on the way to this gig or that and who provided a stability she lacked later in her career after they parted ways.
And there was her fatal attraction to Blake Fielder-Civil, who became her husband, introduced her to heroin and who was in jail when she died.
In truth its hard to know who to blame for what. But the effect is like watching a kite without a string, disappear in the distance.
***1/2 Three and one half stars
Directed by Asif Kapadia. Produced by James Gay-Rees. Rated R for language, drug use. Approximate running time: 128 minutes.
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