Movie Review: Amy

Content warning: the film depicts addiction and mental illness, and I also share some of my own personal accounts of dealing with mental illness, so please take care while reading. If you need help, I recommend calling the 988 Suicide Hotline.

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary called Amy, which is about the life of the late singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 from alcohol poisoning. I had been meaning to see this documentary for the longest time because I absolutely LOVE Amy Winehouse’s music. When I was in eighth grade, I was exploring new music, which is a favorite hobby of mine, and I found Yahoo Music had different music stations with various genres of music. One of the stations was called Coffeehouse music, and it featured artists I had never heard of, such as Sia and Amy Winehouse. Up until that point, the musician I was the biggest fan of was KT Tunstall. In seventh grade, I spent hours on YouTube watching her music videos and listening to her songs on my iPod. I am pretty sure I downloaded the entire Eye to the Telescope album on my iPod, because I remember pretty much all the songs on that album years later. When I heard Sia’s “Soon We’ll Be Found” and watched the accompanying music video, her voice blew me away and the music video was so colorful and beautiful. Then after that, a new music video played for a song called “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse. I had never heard of Amy Winehouse until I listened to “Rehab,” and after that, I fell in love. Deep, deep, jazz and R n B love. Amy had a beautiful voice that could just take you back in time to jazz and soul legends like Billie Holliday and Aretha Franklin. In fact, I learned about the late musician Donny Hathaway from listening to a cover that Amy did of “A Song for You.” And then after that, I listened to the original version of “A Song for You” by the late Leon Russell. To be honest, I didn’t grow up listening to Leon Russell even though he goes down in the music history books as a legend, so I wasn’t super familiar with a lot of his work. I am listening to the original as I write this blog post, and it is very beautiful. The song has been covered so many times, and each musician’s performance of the song is unique. I haven’t listened to all of the covers of Leon Russell’s song, but I am sure they are amazing.

Anyway, back to talking about Amy Winehouse. When I was in high school, I remember over the summer hearing about her death at 27, and I grieved and grieved. Even though I read about her struggles with drinking and drugs in the tabloids, I still loved her music and tried not to focus too much on the gossip around her personal life. I remember on July 23, 2011, I was just chilling out at home, and then my mom came in my room and asked, “Hey, do you know about a singer named Amy Winehouse?”

“Yeah!” I exclaimed.

“She passed away,” she told me.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. My mom showed me the news article announcing her death at 27, and I started bawling my eyes out. My mom had to comfort me and hug me as I wept and wept because she had died so young and also was struggling with so much in her personal life. After watching the documentary, I honestly wished she was still alive so that I could thank her for making music that helped me get through all sorts of tough times while coming of age as a young woman.

Fast forward to last year, when I was browsing YouTube on my computer at work, and the ad they showed before was a trailer for an upcoming biopic about Amy Winehouse. It looked epic, and I was so thrilled to see it. But then I thought, Wait a minute, maybe I should watch the documentary first (the documentary came out in 2015 when I was in college) Apparently the biopic bombed, and critics hated it, so I ended up not watching it. I might watch it, but also, I am aware that I am neither a film critic nor a close friend of Amy Winehouse, so I have no idea whether the movie stays true to her life story or not. But I could honestly watch the documentary Amy again. Because it’s real raw footage of Amy Winehouse and real friends and people who worked with her shared their experiences and how she was as a person. I loved the movie from the beginning because they show Amy when she was younger, hanging out with her friends and just being so down-to-earth. The version of Amy Winehouse I often saw in the tabloids focused on her relationships and her issues with addiction, but seeing the documentary reminded me that before celebrities are famous, they are actual human beings with actual stories to tell. I saw a more wholesome portrayal of Amy by watching the documentary. I have stopped reading the tabloids, but from the brief period I spent in middle school perusing the Us Weekly and People magazine issues that came to our house, I think that tabloids tend to sensationalize people’s personal lives and can often include things that are based on hearsay and not actual facts. I may have offended people who read tabloids, but this is just my personal experience from reading these kinds of magazines. They tended to focus on Amy Winehouse as this out-of-control drug addict with a drinking problem who had spats with her fellow British contemporary Lily Allen and engaged in reckless behavior.

Of course, the movie definitely doesn’t shy away from her struggles with mental health, because she really did struggle with bulimia and alcohol and drug addiction and she openly discusses her struggles in “Rehab” and other songs. But the movie also shows her in this very authentic way, like she was an actual human being who just wanted to make music and live a normal life. was this incredibly talented jazz artist who had excellent taste in music and also wanted people to respect her privacy. It was really painful to watch the footage of her having to walk through a sea of paparazzi swarming her and asking questions about her personal life and taking photos of her. Amy says quite a few times through the movie that she doesn’t care about fame and just wants to make great music. The footage where the paparazzi are swarming her reminded me of Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997. I was too young to remember that traumatic event, to be honest, but I watched this TV show called The Crown, which depicts the life of Queen Elizabeth II, and even though it’s a biographical drama, it is based on real events that happened in the lives of the royal family. In season 5, Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) went on the record and did a public interview with Martin Bashir, a journalist, and gave him a very honest account of how poorly the royal family treated her and Charles having an affair with another woman while him and Diana were married. In the episode where she does the interview, Prince Philip threatens to blackmail her, but after enduring so much emotional and psychological abuse from the family, she isn’t taking their crap anymore and her and Charles get a divorce. Even after she gets divorced, though, the press still invades her private life, and the royal family still treats her as a target for nasty gossip. She ends up meeting a young man named Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian film producer who is the son of a wealthy billionaire named Mohamed Al-Fayed, and Diana and Dodi fall in love. Honestly, the last season of the show was so hard to watch because I knew that they were going to show the events leading up to the car crash that killed both Diana and Dodi. The two of them just wanted privacy and just wanted to enjoy their time together, but because Diana was such a public figure, she wasn’t able to live the private life that she wanted. The paparazzi swarmed them, and in an attempt to escape from the paparazzi, the driver, who apparently was drunk, lost control of the vehicle and crashed. Honestly, after watching this episode, I still could not wrap my head around how a bunch of paparazzi were so desperate to invade this woman’s private life that they were willing to jeopardize her life to the point where she got into a fatal accident. Of course, as I read the Wikipedia article, I realized that there were other factors that went into the crash, but I won’t get into every detail about the crash because honestly, reading about it made me even sadder. Watching The Crown made me kind of wish that I had met Diana, because she just seemed like a very down-to-earth person who loved helping people and donating to charities.

Like Diana, Amy didn’t want her life to be publicized for the press. She wanted to live a normal life, but after “Rehab” blew up the public started expecting her to perform the same song over and over again, and so she felt constricted and pigeonholed. After Amy’s death, I began to explore her other music and came across a beautiful gem of an album called Frank, which was released in 2003. I swear, I have listened to this album more times than I can remember because the songs are THAT good. Even though Amy was known as a popular singer, the documentary shows that she really wanted to be known for her contributions to jazz. She considered herself a jazz singer and wanted to be like the jazz greats, and one of my favorite scenes of the documentary is when Amy sings with the late legend (and one of her biggest idols) Tony Bennett. Amy is recording in the studio with him, but she gets really nervous about messing up and making mistakes. She gets frustrated at first and tells Tony that they should end the session, saying that she doesn’t want to waste his time. But Tony is patient and understanding, and he works with her through the music, and they practice it until she feels comfortable enough to record it with him. After the recording session, they hug, and they later show Tony reflecting on his time recording with Amy Winehouse after her passing. Tony says that Amy had this very raw voice, and I couldn’t agree more. Honestly, at a time when I was still growing and dealing with my own insecurities as a teenager, Amy’s music was a source of comfort, and even in my 30s her music is still a source of comfort for me. Even at such a young age, she seemed like an old soul who didn’t care about mainstream trends even after her album Back to Black was on the pop charts.

The Amy documentary also showed the very real and raw struggle of mental illness and addiction. Amy struggled with an eating disorder called bulimia nervosa, and during her relationship with her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil she struggled with drug addiction. Her friends and the team who worked with her on her albums made several efforts to encourage her to get professional help, but what the documentary showed me is that recovery from addiction is a serious long battle and everyone has their own personal journey with addiction. As someone who never dealt with addiction, I don’t know how long recovery takes, but I can imagine that it is a very difficult journey, from what I can understand after talking with friends and acquaintances who have dealt with addiction. The recovery process also probably takes a lot of patience and compassion from the loved ones of those dealing with addiction. It can be painful to see someone you love dealing with addiction, because like any mental illness, it can be a pain to go through and impacts not just your relationship with yourself but also your relationships with the people around you. I remember when dealing with major depressive disorder how I often felt worthless and dealt with thoughts of hurting myself and not wanting to be alive, and it obviously scared my parents shitless because the last thing you want to hear your daughter say over and over again is, “I’m tired of living. I want to go kill myself.” It’s taken years of professional help for me to get to where I am now, and trust me when I say this, seeking professional help is never a sign of weakness. Therapy is expensive, and because I’m not a doctor I can’t diagnose people or tell them they need to get therapy and/ or medication, because not everyone has a good experience with medication and/or therapy. All this to say, that if you need to seek professional help (or at least find a friend or loved one who you trust) that is perfectly ok.

Also, just a side fact, I think Amy Winehouse chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I know I just spent this entire blog post bashing the tabloids, but I read in some new articles that she had encountered Nichiren Buddhism. They don’t mention it in the documentary, but I remember reading a story about how one of Amy’s band members told her about chanting and that she chanted and it made her feel at peace with herself. Honestly, that really encouraged me because for me, I’ve definitely found that chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo has kept me grounded even when dealing with depression and anxiety. Even if I don’t have the energy to chant hours a day, I still wake up and recite my morning and evening gongyo, which is where we recite the 2nd and 16th chapters of a Buddhist teaching called The Lotus Sutra. Of course, you still go through struggles like any human being even after chanting, but chanting has helped me gradually become a stronger person and develop more confidence in myself. This wasn’t an easy process at all, and I spent a lot of my teens and 20s battling depression and low self-esteem, but through it all, I kept chanting morning and evening, and it helped me come back to my original self, my identity as a Buddha, someone with inherent wisdom, courage, compassion and life force.