Director Sam Taylor-Johnson may be well-intentioned but Back to Black is a big miss
“You can’t blame everything on me”
Even if Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy hadn’t come out just a few years ago, it is hard to see what director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh thought they were trying to achieve with Back to Black, a film created ostensibly without any input from Amy Winehouse’s family and loved ones but which somehow manages to absolve them of much, if indeed any, culpability for the way in which her too-short life panned out.
Consequently, there’s an unforgivable shift of responsibility onto Winehouse herself which feels horribly lurid, almost tabloid-like in its sensationalism. Covering the decade-ish between coming up with debut album Frank and her death at 27, the focus is really on the love story between her and Blake Fielder-Civil, which is one way to look at the story sure, but too often is robs her of agency in her rocket-like ascent to music stardom.
The film credits Fielder-Civil with locating the iconic sound for the Back to Black album – we’re to believe that she’d never heard of the Shangri-Las despite being otherwise musically literate – and shows us precious little of the creation of the album, thus robbing us of the chance to see her genius at work. It wouldn’t be so much of an issue if Taylor-Johnson and Greenhalgh hadn’t explicitly made the point that it was Fielder-Civil’s idea all along.
Ironically, the film tries to convince us that his other major influence wasn’t in fact just that. She’s seen trying hard drugs for the first time on her own despite him being the one to introduce them so closely to her. It feels like a pointlessly cruel narrative intervention for a film that is meant to be celebrating its subject; so too the terrible implications of the final scene when he tells her he has moved on and had a child with someone else, so she goes upstairs and then her death is announced….
It all just feels so misguided that it is hard appreciate the work of the company. Marisa Abela does well to try and inhabit Winehouse but though her singing is fine, it lacks the rawness of the original, particularly when it is live performance that is being shown (she still sounds studio-perfect when walking through a festival crowd). Jack O’Connell’s Blake is far too buff to convince as a drug-addled wastrel and Eddie Marsan as her dad Mitch can’t distract us from the revisionist history about his conduct in her life.
Even the great Lesley Manville doesn’t escape unscathed as Amy’s beloved nan Cynthia, a fairly bland performance of a very bland character as written here. And that’s the key issue here, the writing. It is totally acceptable for a biopic of a musical star to focus on their live outside of music but when it does so with no depth or nuance and in some cases, deep deep inaccuracies, then there’s just no point.
