The siren song of the trailer and the stellar reviews made it impossible for me to not see this documentary in a theater. I've asked gal pals and my kids to accompany me to see it, but I had no takers. So it's Saturday Night and it seemed like a good idea to go now before it left the Metro area and I'd be reduced to Netflix and no cinema sound system.
Oh, Amy...why'd you have to leave us so soon. The film leaves all the survivors culpable. It makes the viewer wonder if only far too many times. Her depression, family's divorce and desire to be loved by the men in her life (father first, husband second) were only symptoms. She says that she had demons in her head that she could only tame through her writing. I think many, myself included, who suffer from depression and feelings of abandonment write out the pain in order to make sense of it. Yet the writing and music gave her joy and purpose......so what happened?
What is bizarre to me is how she could take anti-depressants, shift gears with booze and hard drugs and have such an unrelenting relationship with bulimia and not have been hospitalized earlier. It seems that anyone of these medical and self-medicating acts done to extreme for a decade would have hit a wall even earlier. The friends, family and paid help who didn't insist on her taking all the time she needed, repeatedly and consistently must have been ignorant to the full depth and layers of her inner turmoil.
Yet, there it is, captured on film and in her lyrics....the pain, the longing, the need to be held and cared for in a primal way. The macha girl who intimidates men, so that they can't hurt her and her relationships are razor-wire walks instead of cuddle puddles. Drama obscuring reality, because no one dares look at the mundane and messed up truth of the matter.
Several men in the film do try to protect her from herself and others, but none succeeded. Tony Bennet laments not taking her aside and supporting her. I wonder if she would have let him? Could he have been a father figure and mentor that she might have risen to meet, and in doing so, see herself in a positive mirror? That is the problem with documentaries like this, the "what ifs" that one can ask, like a Monday Morning Quarterback, but for which there are no real answers.
I remember meeting Tony Bennett once. I ran into him, literally. It was during a Christmas concert in SF with multiple bands and I had a backstage pass because TMBG was in the line-up. I was walking up a flight of stairs that ended abruptly, having been built only to get on and off of the temporary dressing room platform, and I crashed into TB. He was nonplussed, gave me a hug and said, "Hi, I'm Tony." I told him my name, I asked where my brother might be and he pointed me in the proper direction. This was in the early 90's a part of TB's "come back" era. I thought of it more as a revival of a classic that never should have gone out of style to begin with, but the media was calling it a come back. I just thought, classy guy, my height with a sweet smile. http://www.songkick.com/festivals/529499-live-105-green-christmas-acoustic/id/14130054-live-105-green-christmas-acoustic-1993
To see him in pain over the loss of Amy, a girl he says in the film stands right up there with Ella and Billie in the Jazz Singer cannon, his words summed up the sentiment of the whole film. She was a genius jazz singer, who was growing into a multi-genre singer and should have lived to be old while growing with any new music that came into being.....just like TB has done. He said; "If you live life long enough, Life shows you how to live".
Dani Shapiro quoted this line from the film during our retreat this week. It was relevant to our transforming segments from our lives into chapters of our memoirs. But it is also true of an artist who is having trouble transitioning to a new way of being, while still trying to live her one wild and precious life. May Amy's songs and art continue to catch the ears and imaginations of beings riding the planet earth for many years to come.
Good night, all, good night.
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