Amy Winehouse was one of the most original musical artists of the 21st century. Her music was raw and real and full of pain and rage while genre blending jazz, soul, R&B and reggae. She was as wild and as wise as her music, exuding a feral sexual energy and embodying all the anger of ambitious and talented women in a world hellbent on corralling, taming and commodifying them.
Asif Kapadia's brilliant Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Amy captures Winehouse in all her glorious, damaged, unclassifiable, irrepressible messiness.
The tepid, perfunctory Winehouse biopic Back to Black — from director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh — does not.
If you aren't already familiar with Winehouse's body of work, Black won't do much to clue you in. If you are already familiar with her music, you will likely spend much of the film's runtime wondering just when her song "Rehab" will make its appearance.
Because according to this movie, that's all Winehouse was about, wasn't she? After a too-brief life of substance abuse, bulimia and likely undiagnosed mental illness, she died from alcohol poisoning at age 27 in 2011. Sure, she made some music in there, too, which earned her a shit-ton of major awards. But if you were gauging from this lazy, even cowardly recounting of her life, Winehouse was mostly just a sad young woman who longed for babies and an utterly conventional life.
There's a scene very early in Black, a long uncut one in which the teenage Winehouse sits on her bed writing a song, strumming chords on her guitar as she tries out lyrics. While those lyrics are complicated and confounding, the segment is gentle and sweet and honest about illustrating a young woman's angst while also capturing the electricity of Winehouse's creativity. It's a beautiful cinematic snapshot of Winehouse's lightning-in-a-bottle imagination.
But Back to Black never reaches that height of incisive portraiture again. British actor Marisa Abela, in her first starring role, is very, very good as Winehouse. She's the film's one saving grace. If only the movie around her was worthy of her efforts.
Greenhalgh's shallow script lacks any understanding of the pressures on women — not just Winehouse — to conform in our personal and professional lives. He can put a line of dialogue like "I ain't no f—ing Spice Girl!" in Winehouse's mouth, but he doesn't seem to know how to depict what that would have meant for a popular female recording artist in the 2000s.
It's almost as if Back to Black, for all that it is presumptively about Amy Winehouse, doesn't actually know what to do with her. It assumes if she was this much of a personal disaster, it must be because she wanted an ordinary life — even if absolutely all public evidence is to the contrary. There's a long sequence in which she goes on a first date with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O'Connell) — the man who would later introduce her to crack cocaine — to the London Zoo, and she ends up using the example of a lioness and her cubs to talk about all the many children she wants to have... to a man she just met. Another scene depicts her having a breakdown over a negative pregnancy test.
Winehouse did have massive public breakdowns in her final years. Even people who didn't know her personally knew she wasn't well, but none of that is depicted here. There are a few scenes in which she stumbles through performances. But since her band members aren't presented as characters here, there's no exploration of how they feel about her issues or if they tried to help. We do get a scene in which her hanger-on father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) does say, "I think she's fine," and hence doesn't need to go to rehab. It's a painfully on-the-nose and utterly unironic reference to a lyric in "Rehab." But she's clearly not fine, and the film lets pops and Fielder-Civil off the hook. Appallingly, Back to Black hangs its subject out to dry, just as the people closest to Winehouse actually did in real life. ♦
Back to Black