Amy

AMY               B+                  

Great Britain  (123 mi)  2015  d:  Asif Kapadia

The opening half of this film is as good as anything you’ll see all year, where in the opening thirty seconds, the instant you hear Winehouse’s voice, viewing footage at age 14 at a birthday party for one of her friends, singing “Happy Birthday” followed by such a wrenching version of “Moon River” of all things that you’re already on the verge of tears, becoming a truly inspirational glimpse into what a unique talent and personality she was, possessed with a mature and fully developed voice while still a teenager, with vocal interests ranging from Sarah Vaughn to Ella Fitzgerald, where her jazz stylization at such a young age made her a singular, stand-alone artist in an sea of overproduction and mass commercialization.  Her raw talent is immediately recognizable from the moment you listen to her, where the earliest recordings tend to be jaw-dropping.  The early years of getting discovered, finding a manager, and recording her first album feels like an extremely proud and joyful journey, where everyone can just feel she’s ready to claim instant recognition.  It’s in the second half that the director undergoes his own meltdown, however, losing sight of what was so valuable and extraordinary in the opening, as it wasn’t more meticulous detail about her death that was needed, or sad images of an artist’s meltdown just before she died, where it becomes, literally, an obsession with her trajectory towards death, which feels exploitive and unseemly, literally dragging her through the mud, especially since that kind of graphic exposure is so unnecessary, having already been plastered all over the tabloid press.  Why on earth would we need to see that again?  Nonetheless, despite accentuating her demise well beyond the point of discovering anything new, it’s her early career that should generate a real interest in her work.  Believe it or not, this film will introduce an entirely new audience to her music, where much of this is like discovering it for the very first time.  Easily the most pathetic point in the film is having her drug addiction used as fodder for late night talk show jokes, where the crassness of the cruel humor actually shelters people from understanding the real tragedy of the experience, which this film does bring to life.  Dying of alcohol poisoning at the age of 27, her early demise was expected, perhaps even inevitable, as her name was so associated with explosive tabloid headlines that seemed to feed off of every tragic downturn in her life that the public became numbed by the overexposure.  Even many young people distanced themselves from her, choosing not to follow her music or career, as if that was tainted by another death trip, forever associated with the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Kurt Cobain, all dying at the age of 27.  Actually her death felt very much like the death of Princess Diana, as if both were hounded to death by the Paparazzi.  

Director Asif Kapadia, following a familiar pattern of his highly successful earlier documentary SENNA (2010), which brought recorded footage of Formula One race car driving to life while following the thrills and spills in the racing career of Brazilian champion Ayrton Senna, is seen using home movies, behind the scenes videos, TV appearances, and phone footage, along with interviews from several key people behind the scenes in attempting to develop a more complete portrait of the artist as a young woman, becoming quite successful at humanizing Winehouse, whose career has otherwise been described as a train wreck.  In fact, the prime achievement of the film is to show just how brilliant an artist she was, which shows all the negative publicity and late career Paparazzi obsession in a different light.  Using archival footage from family, friends, and record companies, the film is literally an impressionistic mosaic of her life, rarely seeing who’s behind the voices heard throughout the film, instead focusing on Amy herself, a tactic that allows the audience to develop their own opinion of what they see onscreen, where through the years her hairstyle, her body, her clothes, and even her face is literally transformed before our eyes.  Winehouse is seen as a unique soul who never really wanted to be famous, thinking it would be awful and that she might “go mad” if it ever happened, realizing that the music she loved was not “on that scale” and was instead much more personal and intimate.  Growing up in North London listening to jazz singers, she developed a powerful voice while also offering raw and expressive lyrics describing her life, which are literally windows into her soul.  The film allows us to see the sheer force of her personality, that is often girlish, silly and funny, but also ferocious.   According to Kapadia, “She’s such a natural artist.  She picks up a guitar, goes up on the stage, sings and blows you away.”  Her songs are like diary entries, as they describe her problems with addiction, her relationships, and the choices that she made and the people around her made as well, where she loses control over her life at the end and literally becomes this forced public exhibit that is pranced out in front of the public and expected to perform on command, like one of those organ grinder monkeys.  While the intimacy of so many of the personal snapshots draw us closer into her life, becoming a global mega-star left her vulnerable to the constant glare of cameras, where the vulture-like, feeding frenzy treatment received at the hands of the Paparazzi reveal appalling images that when seen today only disgust us.  Because she’s always performing in front of a camera, the viewpoint of constantly watching her face staring back at us suggests we in the audience are complicit in what happened to her, showing an unhealthy appetite for misery and self-destruction, as someone is downloading and watching in mass those YouTube videos of her horrible performances, or buying those grotesque tabloids, so when she’s trotted out in public like a puppet on a string, she’s only doing what we expect and demand of her as a popular mega-artist. 

One of the major pieces of contention in the film is the poisonous atmosphere that going on the road plays with mentally fragile or unhealthy performers, where they can keep it together in the controlled studio environment to make a record, but when they have to play to sold-out stadiums promoting their work for extended periods of time, the temptation for drug and alcohol use is simply too great for some with addiction problems to overcome, becoming their ultimate downfall, sending them into toxic tailspins they can’t recover from, especially when those around them keep sending them out on the road as they are relying upon that steady flow of cash coming in.  It’s heartbreaking that people don’t think to save a life first and foremost, but in Winehouse’s case, everyone, including the artist herself, was in a state of denial about the seriousness of her health problems, especially since drugs played such a major part of her life.  Because the audience is so familiar with the outcome, it plays out a bit like Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), a heartbreaking recreation of a Columbine High School massacre, where in each, the audience looks for key indicators of what might have been done differently to create a different outcome.  Obviously what makes these films so tragically sad, bordering on horror, is watching them play out with no one recognizing any of the signs or showing the least bit of concern, even as so many cries for help were left along the way.  Her family, who are part of her inner circle, has denounced the film as misleading, disassociating themselves from it and stopped all contact with the director.  While the film does show the hangers-on and the murky and often disturbing conditions surrounding her, where those closest to her might have actually had a hand in driving her over the edge, especially the decisions (“My daddy thinks I’m fine”) made by her money-grubbing father, overall there’s enough blame to go around, but the film’s real intentions are to regain a bit of her humanity and illuminate what’s so remarkable about this extraordinary artist.  Some of the most remarkable early footage comes from her friends, Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert, as collectively they videotaped everything they did, offering a loose, freewheeling style that really energizes the film.  At only 16, she finds a young manager in Nick Shymansky, who’s only 19, so her early rise is more like a couple of kids having a fun night out.  Perhaps all along, she modeled herself after and considered herself a jazz singer, yet she was marketed and eventually treated by the Paparazzi as a pop star.  The truth is jazz is a smaller marker niche, where playing to jazz festivals and small clubs doesn’t draw the same crowds or generate cultural interest at Grammy Awards, where the potential income is severely diminished.  The tried and true formula for success has always been to go for the money and fame, because with financial security comes the ability to make better choices in the long run.  When Winehouse sings a duet with one of her idols, Tony Bennett, she’s almost embarrassed at not holding her own, where her voice at that stage in her life is already failing.  Speaking afterwards, Bennett reminds us that no jazz artist likes to perform in front of fifty thousand people, before offering the final sobering thoughts that we can’t help but share, “Life teaches you how to live it…if you live long enough.” 

Manglehorn

MANGLEHORN            B               

USA  (97 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  David Gordon Green

David Gordon Green continues to confound, even at this stage of his career, where he’s no longer the young indie filmmaker that made visually spectacular films about relationships and growing up, like George Washington (2000), or his big budget stoner comedies, like The Sitter (2011), while the new phase he’s entered into includes working with name actors, such as Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in Prince Avalanche (2013) and Nicolas Cage in Joe (2013).  It’s highly unusual, to say the least, to finally see an actor of Al Pacino’s stature to be working with the heralded indie director, and Holly Hunter as well, where the viewer simply hasn’t a clue what to expect.  What is indisputable, however, is that Green is one of the best directors of his generation, where he was one of the first, with many following afterwards, to come from the North Carolina School of the Arts Film School, which has also produced Green’s cinematographer Tim Orr, actors Danny McBride and Paul Schneider, but also new indie filmmakers Jeff Nichols and Aaron Katz.  Refusing to be pigeonholed, this film feels like a spectacular failure, as it strives to be unlikeable and commercially off the edge, where he’s not going out of his way to build a new audience.  But what it has is an uncompromising spirit, where Pacino isn’t simply some lovable old man with a cat, like the popular Art Carney in Paul Mazursky’s life-affirming HARRY AND TONTO (1974), where Carney won the Academy Award for Best Actor in the same year Al Pacino was nominated for THE GODFATHER II (1974).  Instead this film has the balls to deviate from standard practice and allow Pacino to play a despicable and thoroughly deplorable human being.  While it’s likely this was the criteria that drew him to the role in the first place, as it’s the exact opposite of what leading men are used to playing.  At age 75, the general feeling is that Pacino can do whatever the hell he wants to do at this stage in his career, as he’s free to choose the material that interests him the most.  Still, it may come as something of a surprise just how detestable and loathsome he really is in this role, where the audience has to put up with him in nearly every frame of the film.  To put it bluntly, this is not an easy experience.  Yet that’s the unwelcoming quality both Green and Pacino bring to this film.  Accordingly, it speaks volumes about the recalcitrance of old age. 

First and foremost is the voice, where Pacino’s gravelly, world-weary voice narrates the entire film, much of it dictated letters written to a long lost love named Clara, who it appears was the love of his life―not the woman he married, we learn much later, but the one that got away, who in his mind has been built up to be so much more than she ever was in real life.  In short, she has become an obsession that he can’t control, as he measures everything else that happens in the world next to his image of her, where nothing even comes close.  Accordingly, his life is a series of neverending disappointments, with occasional moments when things aren’t so bad, but what follows is a flood of disillusionment with the way of the world.  A.J. Manglehorn (Pacino) is a lone locksmith by trade, burrowed into that hole of an office where he works and barely ever speaks to anyone, preferring a life of solitude where he continually chatters away to his cat, or the friendly bank clerk Dawn (Holly Hunter), who he waits to be serviced by, where for two or three minutes they’re like long-lost friends as he deposits his weekly earnings, doing it all over again the next week at the exact same place and time.  To say he is a creature of habit is an understatement, as at his age, he comes to rely upon the safety and normalcy of routine.  You might even say it’s what keeps him alive, as that’s all he has to look forward to.  Without it he’d be lost.  What immediately stands out is what a cranky old bastard he is, bitter and difficult most of the time, where he seems to thrive on giving people a hard time.  But really, he’s simply not used to other people’s company as he spends so much time alone where he experiences a tortuous relationship with the past.  Reliving the failures of one’s life and always reaching the same dead end is not very inspiring, as it leaves him emotionally deflated and disgusted with himself, where he’s in no mood to please others, as he’s so self-absorbed in his own pathetic misery.

His composed letters to Clara are the only moments of optimism and joy, where thinking of her gets his mind right, as the world looks different somehow, filled with color instead of looking dreary and gray, and not so cluttered with meaningless material.  As we hear the umpteenth letter that he composes to her, we can’t even imagine the profound depth of misery and loneliness that accompanies every carefully chosen word.  He gets up the nerve to actually ask Dawn out on a date, which touches a piece of his memory that he hasn’t used in a while, where it’s a bit out of character, but their conversations are extended by several innocent meetings at a local community center serving all-you-can-eat pancakes.  While it’s clear she’s looking forward to it, perhaps she comes on a bit too strong, even though they’re meeting in a mostly empty, nondescript cafeteria.  Not at all on the same page, Manglehorn instead launches into a lengthy soliloquy on Clara, like releasing the fogbanks of his own personal obsessions, showing no regard for his guest, which Dawn finds rude and ill-mannered, eventually leaving in stunned anger.  Manglehorn’s response is to take the uneaten food off her plate and add it to his own meal.  While he’s normally cranky and disgruntled, he usually reserves his surly nature for when he’s alone.  Throughout the film we see evidence of weird and inhospitable moments with his own wealthy but estranged son (Chris Messina), who he barely knows, or a somewhat demented turn from Harmony Korine as Gary, who runs a seedy massage parlor but remembers Manglehorn fondly as the coach of his Little League baseball team, apparently one of the few good guys in his overly troubled childhood.  No moment is stranger than a surrealistic multi-car accident that borders on a tribute to Godard’s WEEKEND (1967), where bodies are lying inertly on the ground or hanging out of doors, as doctors have not yet arrived on the scene, but instead of blood there are crushed watermelons strewn around everywhere, where the color red saturates the bizarre landscape.  The scene is even more impactful by the way it is shot, as Green uses slow-motion to allow observing detail as Manglehorn walks past the carnage, with the muffled sound altered as well, all the while holding onto his prized cat, perhaps his only real friend in the world.  That horrible collision may as well be a metaphor for his life, a series of neverending accidents all strung out together.  But the film is not entirely downbeat, as there is room for one of the more unforgettable scenes of the year, as even Al Pacino is upstaged by a heavyset black man (Tim Curry) entering the bank holding a bouquet of yellow flowers, breaking out into song, singing at the top of his voice, where out of the blue one of the black female managers (Monica Lewis) comes out from the back and joins him in singing the gospel hymn “Love Lifted Me,” Love Lifted Me - Hezeklah Walker & The Love ... - YouTube (5:11), where their offbeat duet may be one of the better staged love scenes of the year, the kind of moment where everyone else just stops to appreciate the novelty of the unraveling event.  It’s a strange and crazy moment in an otherwise dismal journey into the lonely abyss of old age, where Manglehorn is a man that seriously spends entirely too much time with himself, but it’s a brave glimpse into being alone, that dark empty corridor where we are all heading some day.