The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.
I have to open this by confessing something: somehow, I completely missed the window of Amy Winehouse in pop culture as a musical artist and only knew her through her tragic ending. So, for me, this movie offered a little more enlightenment on Amy’s journey, her addictive habits, and her successful career. As a sort of Winehouse-centric jukebox musical, the film really leans on her best and wildest hits to anchor the entire movie. Those songs, by themselves, are inspiring and valuable additions to what would otherwise be an attempt to mythologize Amy with as much subtext as they can build while still losing some of the thread of the story overall. “Back to Black” proves to be a standard musical artist biopic, like any other film, with an effort made to turn her into a tragic figure.
The film follows legendary singer Amy Winehouse from her humble origins singing pub gigs in Camden Town to her incendiary rise to fame, winning five Grammy awards. The story captures her struggle with alcoholism, drug addiction, and a toxic romance that tore her apart from the inside out. The film, more importantly, captures her filial love for her devoted father and her benevolent Nan. The absence of certain characters may speak more to likeness rights struggles than creative decisions. The whole thing still feels like a story less told than it should be. Somehow, despite covering a broad swath of story in just under two hours, Amy’s story feels both repetitive and a little underdeveloped, if only because it lacks the complete picture of who she was and settles for a more mythological perspective (and, arguably, removes some of her agency along the way).
For veteran director Sam Taylor-Johnson, the story of Amy Winehouse appears on the level of Grecian tragedy. The push-pull dynamic of Winehouse’s destructive tendencies fueling her creative ambitions takes center stage, and pretty much everything else falls by the wayside. Overall, the script never strays from that, and it starts to feel repetitive somewhere in the middle. The film, by necessity, truncates the distance between these two ideas so that in one sequence, Amy goes directly from affronting her record label and saying she needs to ‘experience life to write about’ and then discovering the love of her life in a bar that same day. True or not, this turnaround time happens so quickly and often throughout the film that it feels too convenient and simple. I get that this helps the drama unfold more quickly, but at two hours long, the larger question exists: If the time gaps must be shortened, then why draw out the other scenes?
The biggest thing to note about this film is the more extended scenes for almost every major moment. Every fling, every downward spiral, every drunken rage feels just a hair too long, with a few beats revisited minutes after they were introduced. No one scene could be removed and still happily feel like it belongs, but the addition-by-subtraction kind of editing applied to a story like this would churn out a movie in the hour-forty range and still accomplish the exact same thing every time. Even as narrative threads sort of fall by the wayside to revisit Amy’s destructive-creative cycle, the note remains: a light trimming would have this film humming by its end.
Marisa Abela plays the renowned singer with incredible power. Her whirlwind energy captures the singer’s essence as a figure. Notably, Abela did much of the singing herself in this film, and to capture Winehouse’s unique vibrato and sulky ferocity is no small feat. Big things wait for Marisa Abela. Surrounding her are two equally impressive performances by Jack O’Connell as Winehouse’s lover and husband, Blake, and Eddie Marsan as her emotionally complicated father, Mitch. O’Connell’s flirtation scene felt genuinely charming, and I found myself entranced by his boyish charm, laughing when he discovers he’s singing Amy’s music to the woman herself and later his scheming when he learns of her popularity. Eddie Marsan bolsters Abela as the more concerned and grounded character between the three. Amy’s story feels more humanized and honest with a trio like this.
Her rise and fall paints beautifully in some of the details in this film. Even as she plays bigger and bigger venues, her notorious beehive haircut grows and grows, towering over everyone. The early-aughts setting doesn’t flash across the screen so much as linger in the details: double popped collar, flip phones, and small cuts to actual televised moments (not of Winehouse herself but of Grammy presenters.) The intricate details of making this woman grow thinner, larger-than-life makeup, a beautiful subtext that sometimes gets hard to read but proves insightful in adding to the impression of this movie overall.
Ultimately, the biopic here rests somewhere in the middle. While slightly more insightful than reading about her, she is still careful to paint Winehouse as a victim of her own addictions and her need to create. It never shows her actual demise, instead resting on a painfully bright moment of clarity. There are scenes with real lightning-in-a-bottle. The BBC Live recording of Valeria genuinely shook me and reminded me that, above all else, that song is something captured from the creative ether and given form for all of us to enjoy. Then the film repeats itself with the whirlwind of Amy Winehouse destroying something she built and only vaguely hinting at a psychology of understanding that so few of us in the general audience would expect of her.
In Theaters Friday, May 17th
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