09/04/2024 - Iconic British soul singer Amy Winehouse’s life returns to the screen in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film, yet too many elements are off-key

In a film industry reliant on intellectual property to plunder, the success of the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody [+see also:
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film profile] ushered in a new era where the great (The Beatles and Bob Dylan are on the horizon) and merely successful acts (we see you, the Bee Gees) of popular music are newly welcome at multiplexes, officially authorised by their estates, yet with less artistic justification. As a StudioCanal production, with further support from French broadcaster M6, Back to Black, on the late, great Amy Winehouse, represents one of the first from European cinema aiming to chase this lucrative trend.

Subject to harsh online backlash over its lead Marisa Abela’s physical and vocal suitability for the role, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s serviceable film has also tellingly forgone an awards-season run (where these films have previously thrived), opting for a spring release commencing this week, courtesy of StudioCanal. It sets out not to reintroduce or remind us of Winehouse’s music, nor the tragic backdrop to it, but to create a comfortable sense of posterity where her short life isn’t merely defined by its sordid aspects, vouching for her artistic achievements over a narrative centred on victimhood. Yet this approach lends the film an airbrushed, cosy feel, when her 2011 passing still feels viscerally mourned by the British music industry, and also in the wider national memory in a country that takes fierce pride in its homegrown cultural icons.

Back to Black gets some tricky components right and is assisted by the mere fact that Winehouse’s story is innately compelling, deriving from the particularities of her suburban London upbringing, and of what distinguished her and allowed her to flourish amidst a fickle, changing music industry. Regardless of its showbusiness setting, it’s also a timely examination of self-destructive behaviours and pathologies. Limiting its action to the mid-2000s, its two narrative fixations are her abusive, co-dependent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (played charismatically, if broadly, by Jack O’Connell) and how that suffering counter-intuitively helped birth her most famous and enduring music: the LP lending the film its title, and the confessional yet affirmative songcraft of “Rehab”, “Tears Dry on Their Own” et al.

Tragic early passings such as Winehouse’s always generate examinations of culpability. Matt Greenhalgh’s script lightly offers one suggestion: on first meeting Blake in a grubby Camden pub, many alcohol units down even at lunchtime, she nevertheless instructs him, “Class A drugs are for mugs.” Yet their stormy life together, and eventual marriage (anointed in a Florida hotel suite, where a ring box opens to reveal a crack rock), was defined by Blake initially getting her hooked. Fully authorised by her estate, her father and sometime manager Mitch Winehouse (Eddie Marsan) is portrayed in benevolent terms, when Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed documentary Amy [+see also:
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film profile], from 2015, painted him as equally malign an influence as Fielder-Civil.

Whilst Abela convinces in the dramatic scenes, excelling with the sarky cynicism of her public persona, and evoking her strong-willed and self-possessed ardour for success (and eagerness to indulge in the spoils of said success as she wished), the musical set-pieces fail to pop, from the British actress’s unconvincing vocal imitation to the cheap-looking, pared-down replicas of various iconic gigs at Glastonbury and the Grammys. But orchestrating a flat show for such a charismatic fireball is one thing (and whatever your thoughts on that film, Austin Butler in Elvis overcame this with flying colours); treating this fictionalisation as a mere, even-handed tribute, when it’s really a tragedy deserving of the most sensitive and insightful handling, is another.

Back to Black is a production of France, the UK and the USA, staged by StudioCanal and Monumental Pictures.