When someone is larger than life, we, by definition, tend to forget that they can and will eventually die. Incredible talent will lead us sooner or later to feel as though a person is unreal—a poster to be hung on a wall, maybe. Certainly something other than human. And so we laugh when the wrong combination of mental illness and substance abuse causes someone like Amy Winehouse to become a late-night punchline, and we gawk at the paparazzi photos of them wandering the streets bloodied and dazed, because we have forgotten that behind the celebrity is a real, flesh-and-blood person in need of some serious help.
So yes, when Winehouse finally did die in 2011, there was shock (although no one who had watched her self-destruct for years could honestly claim to be surprised), and there was guilt. Maybe if we hadn’t been so eager for a Back to Black followup, she wouldn’t have felt so much pressure. Maybe if we’d ignored the tabloid stories about her, they would have left her alone. Maybe.
That guilt is certainly present in Senna director Asif Kapadia’s new documentary, Amy. Some may say the lion’s share of it belongs to her father, Mitch (who has publicly denounced the film’s portrayal of him and is reportedly working on his own movie as some sort of rebuttal). We hear friends recount how he single-handedly shut down the first attempt to get the singer into treatment, and we even hear Mitch himself say his daughter “didn’t need to go to rehab.” (Although he claims Kapadia edited out the part where he said “at that time.”) We hear about how he pushed her to go out on tour when she was in no condition to do so. We watch him argue with Amy after bringing a camera crew to St. Lucia, where she had gone to escape and get clean, to film a special called My Daughter, Amy. But what really makes Amy so completely heartbreaking is the revelation that it wasn’t just Mitch.
You’ll cringe when you hear Winehouse’s mother recall how she didn’t really do anything about her daughter’s bulimia because she “thought it was just a phase” or when it’s asserted that, while the singer was lying in a hospital bed after an overdose, her manager at the time—instead of canceling her upcoming tour—made a comment about how many musicians are still able to function on heroin. And when, towards the end, Kapadia refuses to cut away from the singer’s disastrous final concert in Belgrade, unflinchingly presenting us with footage that is very difficult to watch, you’ll be dumbfounded that anyone could possibly look at the person on stage and think that she belonged in front of thousands of people instead of in the back of an ambulance.
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