Asif Kapadia’s 90-minute documentary on Amy Winehouse confirms the age old notion that watching self-destruction is like catnip for humans. We love to watch the rise but we even more we love to watch the fall. It’s big business and somehow has become a normal part of our daily lives. Though Winehouse’s legacy has long been tied to her drug use and sudden death, this doc will likely bring back the reasons most fell in love with her in the first place: that voice.
She was a brilliant musician, songwriter and singer. Brilliant is not an exaggeration in her case. She was gifted with vocal range, a unique interest in jazz singers, and that unteachable ability to connect deeply with the music. Her songs seemed to come from a dark place, one that Winehouse had never inhabited. She didn’t come from tragedy. She was never abused. She wasn’t mistreated by men. Her only real problem was addiction – to food, which led to lifelong bulimia that probably killed her, drugs (of course), alcohol and men.
This was part of what held back Winehouse’s ultimate acceptance as a true jazz singer. She was singing about stuff she couldn’t possibly have lived. She was fine as a pop star but would she ever join the ranks of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett and Nina Simone? This documentary makes a good case that she very likely will and should.
Spend enough time with addicts and you quickly realize that life as it is won’t do. It’s too boring. When your brain is addicted to the very highs you can’t tolerate the middle for very long. Winehouse’s addictions were more important to her than anything else, even her dedication to music and her will to survive. She was warned again and again but nothing could really stop her.
At one point she admits that life is boring without drugs. Her husband Blake is the one many accused of leading to her downfall, as he introduced her to crack and heroin. She wanted to keep him and he wanted to keep her money which gave him a steady supply of drugs and the good life. Once he was out of her life, however, it was still hard for her to maintain any kind of healthy life. It wasn’t that she couldn’t — it was that she didn’t want to.
Director Kapadia seems to want it both ways. We’re meant to see Winehouse demise as a tragedy yet she doesn’t have the kind of miserable upbringing someone like Marilyn Monroe had. She didn’t come from extreme poverty like Elvis Presley. The worst thing that ever happened to her was her mother putting her on anti-depressants when she was a teenager. Whether that helped opened the door for the continual need to zone out is up for debate. As it stands, she is more along the lines of Jim Morrison — someone to whom most things came way too fast and way too easy. Morrison has easily slipped into the legend zone, with no lingering negative feelings about his drug use.
Other than bearing witness to her downfall, the documentary does provide footage of Winehouse singing. It’s also a relief to see video of her being a normal teenager. She was funny and she didn’t much care what anyone thought of her. Even when she was hounded by photographers and her tragedy was splayed out for all to see in the tabloids she continued not to care. She wasn’t interested in fame, nor in having people like her. She was very simple in what she was — someone who liked to make music and someone who liked to get high.
In the end, the film goes on a little too long about someone who just wasn’t all that interesting beyond what she could do with her voice. She was so young when she hit it big she didn’t really have time to become someone interesting. As Tony Bennett says at some point in the film, “life tells you how to live it if you can stick around long enough.” Winehouse would have become someone interesting. Who knows what great things she might have done. Her withering body, her drunken antics, her loser boyfriends all eclipsed that undeniable talent. But perhaps it’s time for that story to change.
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Here’s the thing about addiction. It is a subtle foe. You can have had the most tragic childhood possible or the most blessed. Addiction, unlike humans, is not judgemental.
I believe that if the cause of addiction was as black-and-white as tragedy or the need to “zone out” than it would be easier to cure.
Looking forward to this very much.
Brian
Bryce,
Here is the trailer for Arabian Nights! http://youtu.be/yONovEHyvXo
I was also troubled by this reviews. Trivializing addiction is not “interesting”.
I’m glad you said it, UBOURGEOIS. I was pretty troubled by this review and the seeming disregard for the realities of addiction.
How pissed people will be when they campaign Mara in Supporting is my pick for most urgent question
Paddy, SoT makes one wonder if those in charge of the festival actually watch the films before selecting them, as they claim they do, or if they just invite their friends. Same names year in and year out, whether their works be good or crap.
Bryce, yeah now we finally have a real BP contender! Waiting for MacBeth… Cate vs. Marion for the win?
Gosh this debate is tricky… always hf the constructive dialogues on these pages, but I don’t think I could truly much of worth right now.
I’ll admit that I too find this review a little troubling…
She was very simple in what she was — someone who liked to make music and someone who liked to get high.
In the end, the film goes on a little too long about someone who just wasn’t all that interesting beyond what she could do with her voice.
Not from what I’ve read and not from what I’ve heard. So maybe growing up relatively privileged makes your life uninteresting, regardless of what struggles you go through, but there are short stretches of this review that seem to dismiss those struggles that Amy suffered through simply because they weren’t rooted in a difficult childhood. I’ve faced death a number of times so far in my life and I’m only 24, and I wouldn’t consider my comfortable, middle-class upbringing easy or happy at all – in fact, it was pretty miserable. Done right, a film about anyone’s life can be made interesting.
Anyway, fuck yeh Cemetery of Splendour trailer! And to think Sea of Trees is up for the fucking Palme…
“CAROL > MAD MAX: FURY ROAD! Bravo!” –Cannes
I’m not twisting your words because I’m not claiming that you ever said anything about drugs. I’m saying some things that are not directed at you. I’m saying things to be specific in order to try to clear the overall haze of vaguary.
It doesn’t take any extraordinary willpower to quit valium, ecstasy, ketamine, coke or any of those. You just stop buying them and stop putting them in your nose and mouth. Done. Dependence or fondness for getting high is not addiction.
Okay, it’s 100% false that you can’t be addicted to valium, ecstasy, or cocaine. They certainly aren’t as addictive as, say, heroin, but just like some people get addicted to heroin or alcohol or nicotine and some don’t, other drugs affect different people differently. For many it’s obviously not as simple as just quitting cold turkey. (I’d also ask what exactly is the difference between dependence on a drug and addiction to a drug, but that’s a different discussion)
Let’s be clear. Amy Winehouse did not die from drug addiction. She did not die from any drugs. She simply, tragically, drank too much. Way too much.
I am well aware, and I never said as much. No comment I’ve made so far has used the word “drug”. As Sasha wrote, Amy Winehouse had many addictions, one of which was to alcohol, which is what ultimately did her in (with help from bulimia, which I also didn’t know about). You’re kind of twisting my words here yourself, at this point.
Either way, my objection lies more in the one-two punch of declaring death as a result of addiction nontragic
I’m not going to defend the whole paragraph that bothers you, but I suspect if you ask Sasha point blank whether or not she feels Amy Winehouse’s death was tragic or not, she will say yes.
But here again, not only are you twisting Sasha’s words you are not even sticking to the FACTS of Winehouse’s death or the words in Sasha’s review.
Let’s be clear. Amy Winehouse did not die from drug addiction. She did not die from any drugs. She simply, tragically, drank too much. Way too much.
Full disclosure: of all the dozen kinds of drugs Amy Winehouse reportedly did in her life, I’ve played with all of them except for heroin. None of the others are ever going to kill anybody unless you’re reckless and swallow too many of them.
But reading this today, I thought I recalled reading that Amy Winehouse had completely kicked all the drugs years ago. (none of which, other than heroin and crack, are even addictive. I know, because I’ve done them all and quit them all with no addictive withdrawal. It doesn’t take any extraordinary willpower to quit valium, ecstasy, ketamine, coke or any of those. You just stop buying them and stop putting them in your nose and mouth. Done. Dependence or fondness for getting high is not addiction.)
Of course I can’t remember where I read Winehouse had kicked all the drug habits (I can’t remember, because, you know, drugs). But it’s ridiculously easy to find dozens of articles that were published at the time of her death that all say she stopped doing drugs of all kinds in 2008.
Here’s one, The Guardian.
Here’s another, CNN.
It sounds like the documentary makes this clear. And this is essentially what Sasha says too. It wasn’t made explicitly clear that the problem was alcohol addiction, but it’s not the thrust of this review to itemize those specifics.
There’s still a lot of confusion about it, obviously.
So let’s repeat: Amy Winehouse didn’t die from drugs or drug addiction. She quit doing drugs in 2008, according to multiple sources, including Winehouse herself. And she was proud of herself for quitting.
She quit doing drugs 3 years before excess alcohol caused her death.
She was trying to overcome her alcoholism, and she was unsuccessfully trying to cope with that. The official cause of death was from having too much alcohol in her blood which caused a coma and respiratory failure. 5 times over the legal limit will knock anyone down, with or without being “addicted.”
But it’s news to me — and I’m glad Sasha brought this out — a contributing factor and probable cause of her fatal vulnerability was bulimia. I never knew about this until today. That’s another type of addictive struggle, and I don’t know enough about it to say anything other than: how very very sad.
Personally I don’t have any hesitation in saying the death of Amy Winehouse was a tragedy.
There is effective help readily available for bulimia. There is effective help readily available for alcoholism. It’s my understanding that she was seeking help but perhaps too little and obviously too late.
This tragic situation is a lot more complex that a brief review is obligated to cover, and it’s a lot more complex that the mistaken reaction to this review that I’m trying to help straighten out.
[Windows forced an Update laptop restart on me when I was writing my first comment here so the first draft I had to save online here for 5 minutes is not the final version that exists on the page now]
Am I totally off-base in reading “[not] all that interesting” as “boring”?
yep, I think you are. For example, I’m not all that interested in sorting through this choice of words, but I’m not bored by it.
There are billions of people that I’m not all that interested in learning more about, but I’d object if you go around saying: “Hey you guys! Ryan says billions of you are BORING.”
Perhaps I was too liberal in my usage of quotation marks,
yep, I’d say so. You did it three times. You hammered it.
Variety^
Shit, you guys.
“While too early to tell how the trio of pics hang together, it’s possible to say from “Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One,” that audiences are in for a meaty opus that weaves actuality and allegorical fantasy into an outraged portrait of European austerity, witch doctors, the Portuguese politicos at their beck and call, and, most importantly, the unemployed masses. The project’s commercial viability is less clear, though art ouses will certainly find space”
“Gomes’ devotees will delight in how “Arabian Nights” takes structural elements from “Our Beloved Month of August” as well as “Tabu” and stretches them even further: Using Scheherazade as the thread to bring together so many tales was a splendid move, allowing for all sorts of nonfiction and fiction stories to be woven together in a tapestry of frustration, melancholy and burlesque. Choosing Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular d.p. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom to lense the opus further cements Gomes’ reputation among his auteurist followers”
“Widescreen lensing on 16mm [!!!!!!!!!!] gives the satisfying tactility of much of Gomes’ previous work”
Where is a goddamn trailer?!
but at no point in this review does Sasha say that Amy Winehouse was “boring”
I mean,
In the end, the film goes on a little too long about someone who just wasn’t all that interesting beyond what she could do with her voice. She was so young when she hit it big she didn’t really have time to become someone interesting.
Am I totally off-base in reading “[not] all that interesting” as “boring”? Perhaps I was too liberal in my usage of quotation marks, but I don’t feel I’m misrepresenting Sasha here.
Either way, my objection lies more in the one-two punch of declaring death as a result of addiction nontragic and then implying that Winehouse didn’t un-addict herself because she didn’t want to. It could be that I’m misunderstanding, and Sasha is just relaying some thread of reasoning from the film, but it’s pretty outrageous in either case.
How can you just say she was a “boring person” because of her addiction?
ok, let’s please be careful not to twist this into Sasha saying Amy Winehouse was a “boring person” and especially not put those words in quotes because that looks like you’re quoting Sasha and Sasha never said that.
I don’t know if the Amy Winehouse quote in the title of this post is verbatim but if it is, then THAT is something far more “ignorant and harmful” for someone to say publicly, don’t you agree? and we can only hope that millions of people who love Amy Winehouse will realize that people say stupid things when they’re addicted to drugs.
People who have been close to addicts in their lives can easily become exhausted and lose patience with people they love who are are addicts.
I would have let this slide, but it bothers me, UBourgeouis, that you repeatedly (3 times) accuse Sasha of saying Amy Winehouse is “boring” and you put it in quotes 3 times. When it appears to me that the only person in the mix here who spoke about being “bored” was Amy Winehouse herself. So I have to object to the way you’re coming at this issue, ok?
I will say that I agree with you, in regard to Elvis Presley, there does not appear to me anything tragic about his life except the tragedy he inflicted on himself. Rising from a humble or impoverished childhood isn’t tragic; it’s a triumph. In fact, growing up without a lot of money was a nationwide reality for anyone born in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. I would not automatically label any American born during the Depression as having a tragic childhood. From everything I’ve heard, Elvis had a fairly normal childhood.
I would also say that there is nothing universally disastrous about a teenager who is prescribed antidepressants. I would probably not have said that Amy Winehouse’s mother put her on antidepressants because a doctor had to do that. (Although a parent has to allow it, sure.)
Are antidepressants over-prescribed? Absolutely. But countless teenagers and adults have benefited from proper application of antidepressants, so I would personally never want to attach a stigma to antidepressants or suggest any equivalency between antidepressants and worse drugs.
I think we all know the concept of one drug being a “gateway” to the oblivion of worse drugs is a boogeyman tactic to scare kids away from ever hitting a blunt. So I would never suggest that antidepressants are a gateway drug to heroin. Of all the evil caused by all kinds of drugs, both prescription and illicit, I think properly prescribed antidepressants are among the least evil and have helped to rescue many lives of teenagers and adults.
But really, the main thing I want to make clear: Sasha might feel that Winehouse had not yet lived a life that was interesting enough to warrant such close examination, and she has every right to feel that way, but at no point in this review does Sasha say that Amy Winehouse was “boring.”
So you’re undermining your argument, UBourgeois, by attacking this review from that angle.
I agree this website’s articles and reviews have become more and more ignorant and dis-credible in the last few years. In all honestly to the editors: I only read this website when when I want to zone out and not use my brain.
Trailer for Weerasethakul’s CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEWBNM7mRiY
We should hear about – C – A – R – O – L – any minute now!
I’m, uh… kind of horrified at this review? How does it make sense to say that the story of someone who was so ravaged by addiction that it took her life before she hit thirty just obviously isn’t tragic? Amy Winehouse had a disease that she struggled with the entire time she had the bright spotlight of fame over her head, and it eventually claimed everything she had. How can you just pass that off as no tragedy? How can you just say she was a “boring person” because of her addiction? Are people struggling with depression “boring” to you? Are people afflicted with PTSD “boring”? Elvis may not have had a lot growing up, but he got over it in a big way – that’s no tragedy, that’s a success story. Winehouse couldn’t win out against her devils, and now people say she was lazy and boring for it. That’s tragic.
Of particular note is this line:
It wasn’t that she couldn’t – it was that she didn’t want to.
Um, no, it’s exactly the former – that’s precisely what addiction is. Unless this is referring to some particular scene or idea from the film I don’t understand how you could publish something so ignorant and harmful here.