Amy

Composite Score: 85.23

Featuring: Amy Winehouse, Mitch Winehouse, Mark Ronson, Lauren Gilbert, Juliette Ashby, Nick Shymansky, Tyler James, Sam Beste, Salaam Remi, Yasiin Bey, Blake Fielder, and Tony Bennett

Director: Asif Kapadia

Genres: Documentary, Biography, Music

MPAA Rating: R for language and drug material

Box Office: $23.71 million worldwide

Why should you Watch This Film?

                Amy is the biographic documentary about the short but eventful life of the brilliant musician Amy Winehouse. It follows her life and career from adolescence through her tragic death in 2011, chronicling her rise to popularity in the music industry alongside her struggles with substance abuse and eating disorders and the many figures who influenced her toward and away from those struggles. Unfolding through a myriad of voiceovers played over archive footage of Winehouse’s life and performances, the story shows the tragic impact of fame, apathy, and greed as both internal and external forces on young celebrities. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and continues to be celebrated as one of the best music documentaries of the 2010s.

Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?

                Amy demonstrates the problems that persist with any documentary and/or biopic about tragic celebrities (especially in the music field). It’s a film whose goal is to celebrate the life and accomplishments of its central figure while also pointing a finger at those who caused her tragic demise. Unfortunately, the filmmakers still need to swing the cooperation of those responsible, so their analysis of events ends up sugarcoated and feeling little more than a trauma dump about a dead person who can’t speak for themselves. All of the potential blame in Amy is left to the audience to place, which ends up being more frustrating than rewarding because of how obvious the perpetrators are. It’s a documentary that wants to indict the modern concept of celebrity and paparazzi and all-access fans – those aspects of the industry – but it could not even exist without those very things, so it feels, at best, a bit hollow and, at worst, hypocritical.

So wait, why should you Watch This Film?

                While inherently ineffective in its messaging, Amy does serve as a rewarding celebration of the life and career of this starlet that does offer some bit of commentary on the public’s treatment of those that we don’t know personally. For starters, its use of Winehouse’s music to showcase the different periods of her life allows the artist to almost commemorate herself posthumously, and her songs receive a fully respectful treatment from the filmmakers from front to back in this film. Each one feels intentionally chosen and placed to honor it and the musician who made it, feeling like more than just a greatest hits rehash. Likewise, the interviews and voiceover narration from her friends who truly cared about her – the ones who were there before her fame and celebrity – offer an honest look at the woman and a tragic reminder of what kind of person we lost as the result of celebrity exploitation. In listening to her music and the way her friends talked about her juxtaposed against the off-hand comments from newscasters and talk show hosts, I was reminded of the cycle that often follows unexpected celebrity deaths (most recently I think about Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman) and “the Internet’s” determination to stop talking about things that they don’t firmly know about and to give people their flowers and accolades while they’re alive rather than trashing on them for not meeting one expectation or another, which eventually goes away after a couple of weeks when it’s back to bashing someone new for some unfortunate photo or video that pops up. It’s in offering a subtle critique of this cycle that Amy succeeds most because you see just how harmful the negative statements about the singer-songwriter were to her mental state and to her recovery from addiction. This challenge makes this a film worth watching and worth keeping in mind as a documentary with something important to say.

                Amy’s celebration of Winehouse’s music, life, and career does justice to the incredibly talented young star who was taken too soon while also serving as a critique of the increasingly vocal public and our response to anything other than “perfection” from our celebrities, making it a documentary worthy of a place among the Greatest Films of All Time. Its inability to fully critique the other aspects of the music industry that proliferate such harmful practices holds it back from being a perfect legacy for the tragic star, but the music, the love, and the message that it showcases all deserve to be seen. You can stream this documentary on Max if you’re looking to catch it in the near future.