It is easy to imagine Amy Winehouse's parents still in a state of disbelief when recalling their daughter's limp, sleeping body that failed to wake up in 2011. We imagine it too. Some stories are just too awful to accept. But in peaceful repose she was found, finally free of the demons of addiction and of a battle she herself knew she would never win.
"Amy", by documentary maker Asif Kapadia, who so intuitively captured the loss of Ayrton Senna, does so again by enveloping us in the exquisite sadness that was the core of a huge talent. Like watching a trampled butterfly flapping helplessly on the ground, it is difficult at times to know whether to squash its beauty for good, and end the suffering, or scoop it up and revive its brokenness.
As parents we desperately wish to turn back the clock; to start again, when we see her sassy face with the big mouth and cheeky smile, clowning around in old family videos. We want to grab the tiny tiger containing the voice of a thousand years and seal all those gaping death traps that fame and damaged others opened wide.
At the heart of the documentary is Winehouse's innate God-given gift to sing. At the microphone with her childhood idol Tony Bennett to record his album of "Duets", she struggles with the effects of drug abuse. She stops and starts, and apologizes for her errors. Bennett may look like a cozy grandpa, but he's seen it all before and is quietly understanding. And then it comes, a sound so deep, natural and resonant, almost unreal when one of the world's best crooners stands next to it, that, eyes blinking, we feel our neck hairs reverberate, and that Bennett's must be reverberating too.
Her song-writing skills are impressive. Words are re-purposed for the perception of a dilemma and the impossibility of a predicament, in contrast to her inarticulate, Magaluf-sounding self with friends. But when on holiday in an ordinary hotel complex, she sits on a white plastic chair with an air of melancholic boredom. She is born to be on stage.
Yet, at the crux of the documentary, when all is said and seen about the voice of the 2000's, "Amy" is about self-destruction, and about our own futility when it sinks its talons into the very fiber of a life. That for all the cotton wool we wrap around those we try to save, or every attempt to cajole, bully and shock into help, there will never be a wound or scare tactic big enough to alter their course. Like a ticking time-bomb, we watch the numbers count down to annihilation. Sometimes a power cut allays our fears into false hope, when the victim appears to have sobered or embraced the healthier alternative, only to be followed by a power surge when the ticking re-appears, faster and with an eery intelligence. Statistics for substance abuse recovery are low, alarmingly so. How to challenge a brain that functions when obliterating itself?
That sinking feeling of hopelessness in "Amy" finally drowns in a moment of realization when after a bout of rehab, (yes, despite the song, she did go), Winehouse wins a Grammy. The camera pans to her face, a mix of artifice and genuine surprise, ever the attention-seeking actress she was as a child. She is embraced by the love of a room of family and friends. We rejoice in her apparent sobriety, only to hear that she later told her best friend how none of it was fun without the drugs. When inner elation, achievement and true recognition remain meaningless without mind-altering substances that kill, what else is there?
"Amy" is a compelling piece of someone's life, if a little morbidly fascinating in its juxtaposition of talent and tragedy. Its tempo cleverly crescendoes with the growing intrusion of media and public voyeurism, another component to the unbearableness of living. By the end, we too can't stand it and want to scream out for it all to stop. And it did, allowing her and us some abatement, though only from a hell on earth, and not from her heavenly voice which will last longer.