fbpx

Documentary traces the decline and fall of Amy Winehouse

[additional-authors]
July 2, 2015

“If I really thought I was famous, I would go and top myself,” the soulful British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse says in a media interview in Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed new documentary, “Amy,” which opens in theaters on July 3.

Her words proved eerily prophetic. In 2011, just five years after Winehouse became a global superstar upon the release of her smoky second album, “Back to Black,” she was found dead in her London flat, having succumbed to alcohol poisoning exacerbated by bulimia. She was 27.

Her all-too-early demise was perhaps inevitable for an artist whose life was relentlessly ridiculed in the tabloids as a flaming train wreck. The media gleefully described her toxic relationship with her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, as well as her infamous appearance at a concert in Belgrade, Serbia, during which she was so high on heroin that she staggered across the stage and was booed when she could not sing. At the Grammy Awards, when she won for “Back to Black,” a host repeatedly jeered her for her addictions and at one point called her a “drunkass.”

When Universal Music approached Kapadia (“Senna”) to make a documentary about Winehouse two years after her death, the filmmaker was well aware that the chanteuse’s public image was a sorry mess. But as he embarked upon some 100 interviews, he aimed to showcase what Winehouse’s friends called “the real Amy” — a once bright-eyed, cheeky Jewish girl from North London who went on to become a jazz and blues singer comparable to Billie Holiday, as music legend Tony Bennett says in the film.

By the time of her death, “Amy had become the lowest of the low in the way people would talk about her; she became muck,” Kapadia said during an interview in Los Angeles, speaking alongside Winehouse’s first manager and close friend, Nick Shymansky.

Kapadia, 43, wanted to present a more well-rounded portrait of Winehouse, as he combined archival footage and home videos with more recent interviews of Winehouse’s friends, relatives and colleagues.

“You realize when you see the early footage that here’s this girl who’s funny, pretty, healthy and just really clever, and you say, ‘I’d like to have met her,’ ” Kapadia said.  “And that makes her journey that much sadder. You wonder, ‘How did she go from this to that so quickly?’ What the hell happened in the middle? And then you realize that the answers are all in her songs; they’re like pages in a diary.”

Winehouse’s ditty “Back to Black,” for example, recounts the anguish she felt when Fielder-Civil once left her to return to his old girlfriend; her international hit “Rehab” describes how she refused to enter a treatment facility for her addictions to heroin, cocaine, crack and alcohol in 2005 — with the blessing of her father, Mitch Winehouse, who at the time preferred that she complete all of her scheduled performances.

The singer-songwriter’s relationship with her parents, and especially her father, is shown in the film to be one key to her self-destructive behavior. Mitch Winehouse conducted a longtime extramarital affair when Amy was a child and abandoned the family when she was 9, which devastated the singer, who wore, along with her trademark beehive hairdo, a tattoo reading “Daddy’s Girl.” “My dad was never there growing up; he was all we ever needed,” she says during an interview included in the film.

When Winehouse suffered from bulimia as a teenager, her parents dismissed her eating disorder as a phase. Winehouse’s mother, Janis, also reveals that she was unable to act in a motherly fashion toward her daughter — or to set firm limits to curb Amy’s wild behavior (smoking pot, skipping school) — in part because her own mother had not behaved in a motherly way toward her.

And when Amy eventually tried to escape the paparazzi during an extended vacation in St. Lucia, her father turned up with a film crew in order to tape his own reality TV show.

“There was definitely a big impact emotionally on Amy through the dynamic with her father,” Shymansky, 34, said. “They loved each other, but it was a complex relationship. Whether subconsciously or consciously, she wished he’d taken a firmer position with her throughout her life, to parent her. … She wanted some really firm boundaries from him, which never came: ‘I want what’s best for me to come first from you.’ That’s what she really craved.”

“When you’re essentially told you’re not important or cared about enough when you’re young, you can never care about yourself that much,” Kapadia said.

Shymansky added: “To engage in your creativity that deeply means you’re extremely sensitive. And that can cause extremes of how you love and how you see yourself.”

Although Mitch Winehouse participated in the making of “Amy,” he reportedly ultimately denounced the documentary for depicting him as what he perceived as the villain of the film. 

Asked about the father’s reaction, Kapadia said, “I don’t think the film points a finger at a single individual. It just shows how lots of people, including Amy, made decisions that led to how her life turned out.”

During the interview, Shymansky described how he met Winehouse when she was 16 and he was a 19-year-old aspiring music manager; they hit it off, in part, because of their shared Jewish heritage. As a young child, Shymansky had attended a Jewish day school, “where we used to have to wear tzitzit and a kippah — and my father is Polish-Israeli,” Shymansky said. Winehouse’s great-great-grandfather had emigrated from Minsk to England in 1890, and the family eventually settled in the Jewish enclave of North London. 

“Amy had a really strong Jewishness about her,” Shymansky recalled. “It was her humor and her whole get-up. She and her friends were these loud, mouthy, confident Jewish girls. I used to go to Friday night dinners at her grandmother’s place, and when she and [a friend] got their first flat, you’d go in and they’d offer you chicken soup and knaidlach. Neither of us was particularly religious, but we were very culturally Jewish.” In a home video in the film, Winehouse ebulliently tells Shymansky that she is “your favorite Jewish girl apart from your mum.”

Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, the day before Shymansky’s wedding; his nuptials, he recalled, “were loving, but like a wake. … I just remember that on the day of my wedding, every newspaper had a photograph of Amy in her body bag,” he added. “And the next day was the funeral.”

Shymansky said Kaddish for Winehouse in the traditional Jewish ceremony, before going off on his honeymoon. “But I was completely broken,” he recalled of that trip. “I was sick, and I crashed the car.”

Shymansky said he was hesitant, at first, when Kapadia approached him about the documentary a couple of years later. “I thought it was too soon,” he said, “and it was still so painful that I didn’t want to talk about it. … But when I met up with Asif, he wasn’t pushy or nosy, but really chill and sensitive. I eventually got this real sense that there would be a lot of quality and craft going into her story, which had never happened before.”

Shymansky had often walked alongside Winehouse as she was stalked by paparazzi — one of them even stuck a camera up her skirt — and clips from some of the assaultive media frenzy are prominently featured in the film.

Kapadia paid members of the paparazzi for their footage, which, he said, initially had proved to be something of an ethical dilemma for him. “But I knew I needed the audience to feel what was going on for Amy, and for it to get as visceral as possible,” Kapadia said. “Eventually, I felt that how I got this material was not as important as painting a picture of how this was a horrible way to live.”

His documentary ultimately raises the question: “Why did we let this happen [to Amy]?” Kapadia said. “I don’t remember any media pieces saying, ‘This is horrible; someone stop it,’ ” he added. “We all watched the footage of Winehouse’s [decline]. And I want audiences to feel a bit angry and perhaps a little bit complicit in what happened to her.”

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.