Amy

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the 2015 documentary Amy. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 11:30 AM on The Movie Channel Xtra, and again later in the week on another of the Showtime channels; check your box guide or favorite listings site for details.

Amy Winehouse died in 2011 at the age of 27, after several years of being the brunt of tabloid punchlines for her drug and alcohol abuse. So we know how the movie is going to end. But that's not how the movie begins. Instead, it starts when Amy was 14 of 15, sharing a birthday celebration with a couple of her friends. When Amy starts singing "Happy Birthday", it's clear that even at this young age she's a phenomenal talent.

But even then, this phenomenal talent was beset with personal problems. She admitted to her mother already as a teenager that she suffered from bulimia, while she also openly said that Mom should have been a bit tougher on her and not spoiled her so much. Dad also seems a bit distant, at least until Amy becomes financially successful. It's all enough to engender clinical depression, as Amy discusses some of the prescription drugs she was on.

Unsurprisingly, Amy's talent gets spotted and she quickly starts climing the ladder of success, helped by an older boyfriend, Nick Shymansky, who decided at the age of 19 to become her manager, at least until the suits in the music industry took over control of Amy's career. Although she became a success, she ominously says in one of her early interviews that she doesn't think she'd be able to handle the success, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise considering what we already know of her life up to that point. One of her producers, Salaam Remi, comments on hearing her perform at an audition, that this is an 18-year-old girl with the voice of a 65-year-old jazz singer. Presumably, he also means that she's got the life experience of a 65-year-old jazz singer, too.

At any rate, Amy starts falling into the spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that seems a common theme for fictional jazz movies, probably because it really did happen in real life. Amy has a new boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband, Blake Fielder, who knows how to procuer the good stuff and is perfectly willing to take the drugs along with Amy. Both of them really need to go to rehab, but the first time it's suggested to Amy and her entourage, her Dad puts his foot down and says no, which was probably the wrong thing but I don't think was malicious even though as the movie plays out we see Dad to be the one person more than anybody else to make serious mistakes in handling Amy.

Not that everybody else around Amy didn't make mistakes. Blake is certainly right up there with Amy's father, an addict who pushes Amy further into drug abuse like Jack Lemmon does to Lee Remick in The Days of Wine and Roses, with the difference that Amy didn't need much of a push considering all the problems that she had before becoming successful. There's also a music promoter whose job is to keep Amy in the public eye, which clearly doesn't always mesh with Amy's mental health needs.

All of this -- and we get voiceover interviews from a bunch of people, along with home video footage and other archival footage from studio sessions and public performances -- plays out over those performances, where we see Amy writing some extremely personal songs, such as one titled "Rehab". She does eventually go into rehab a couple of times, with the paparazzi hounding her, and obviously it only has a temporary effect.

Amy is a fascinating story of tragedy of a singer I really only knew about from the personal problems, not being a huge fan of jazz. There are a lot of interviews here that work well, and some really insightful comments from the people who were famous for reasons unrelated to Amy, such as Tony Bennett's comment right at the end. I did, however, have a problem with some of the archive footage, which I found myself thinking more and more over the course of the movie was being manipulated, if not some outright reenactments. The closing credits and everything I read indicate it's all real footage, but still, things like the flashbulbs of the paprazzi came across to me as though they were edited to appear even harsher than they would have been in real life.

It's tough to say who's most at fault for Amy Winehouse's untimely death, or whether anybody would even have been able to stop it considering how young she was when all her demons started manifesting themselves. There's a lot of fault on display here, and a lot of people trying to justify what they did. But Amy Winehouse also left behind some incredibly good music, even if like me you're not much of a jazz fan.

Amy is available on Amazon streaming and did get a DVD release, although I think the DVD might be out of print.