This is a cinematic shaming – of the friends and family who stood by, or enabled, as Amy Winehouse ravaged her body with drugs, alcohol and bulimia, as well as a shaming of every one of us who laughed at a punchline about her erratic behavior, devoured a tabloid report or photo of her or even blithely tapped our toes to her raw, irresistible neo-jazz without once considering the person behind it. Amy is a restoration project, with the goal of reestablishing someone’s basic humanity, never mind that they’re now dead. Director Asif Kapadia puts an important emphasis on Winehouse’s confessional lyrics, elegantly unveiling them on the screen as she sings. Otherwise, he mostly relies on vulnerable home video snippets, of which there is a surprising amount, and invasive paparazzi footage. He seems to heighten the flash of the cameras in these scenes to emphasize their assaultive nature, but I still wish there had been a way for him to make the movie without them. It’s hard to reconcile the fact that Amy, the documentary, largely relies on one of the very things that helped kill her.
