Back to Black | Review

★★

A life lived so vibrantly spotlighted as that of Amy Winehouse’s was ripe for the biographical pickings from the moment of her death, all too soon back in 2011. It’s an indictment of the day and age we live in. Nothing to be proud of. Back to Black is the first dramatisation out of the blocks. It follows, and skulks in the shadow of, Asif Kapadia’s superior 2015 documentary, Amy. Where that film dived deep, upsetting her family in the process, this one’s but a paddle in the shallow end. A superficial and underwhelming entry to the current vogue for jukebox biopics. It’s worse than that though. Back to Black hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise itself as being no better than the then paparazzi it vindicates.

Many, it is likely, will find the film entirely passable. Courtesy of Winehouse herself, it boasts a terrific soundtrack, allowing Sam Taylor-Johnson ample opportunity for montage. It’s an easy win for the Fifty Shades of Grey director, who shoots with eloquence and style. As for the lead, Marisa Abela certainly looks the part. She makes an impressive stab too at vocal impersonation, going hell for leather with song and script alike. Rote, simplistic writing – from Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’s Matt Greenhalgh – does Abela no favours but her effort and respect for Winehouse are palpable. There’s more to capturing Amy than the donning of a beehive and faux ‘Daddy’s Girl’ tattoo.

Amy has neither as the film opens. Back to Black joins her story just prior to the completion of Frank, her debut album, in 2003. It was an album born of anachronism, jazz in the age of manufactured pop. Amy is no f*****g Spice Girl and won’t be manufactured for anyone. She’s a family girl through and through, devoutly close to her nan, Lesley Manville’s Cynthia, and the apple of her parents’ respective eyes. Mum, Janis (Juliet Cowan), is unwell, we’re told, but the film has no further insight there.

More focal is Mitch Winehouse, who is played by a sympathetic Eddie Marsan. The real Mitch hated Kapadia’s documentary – which dared to critique his culpability in Amy’s downfall – but should find Back to Black more palatable. Here, he is a doting, kindly figure. Totally exonerated. True, he’s the man who said no, no, no to rehab but he’s the father that drove her there when she truly needed it. No mention is made of the exploitative documentary he made for Channel 4 just two years before her death.

Also let off rather lightly is Jack O’Connell’s Blake Fielder-Civil, the other half in a toxic, on-off relationship built on chronic obsession and frequent inebriation. Their relationship elicits both the film’s best scene – a woozy and dangerously seductive public house meet-cute – and an uneasy sense of misappropriation. While acknowledging Blake’s role in Amy’s introduction to class-A drugs, Taylor-Johnson takes great lengths to separate him from her first dabble. Instead, focus falls on Blake’s vitality in the forming of Amy’s iconic image and sound. It is true that ‘Back to Black’ – the album – was born of their first breakup – and perhaps he did introduce her to The Shangri-Las – but that doesn’t make him her star progenitor. Theirs was a love story with sharp edges but Taylor-Johnson’s examination is far from incisive.

A lack of penetrating analysis into the reality of Amy’s story proves a pervasive issue in Black to Black. Certainly, Taylor-Johnson’s failure to get under Amy’s skin in the first act, sets up a second that’s merely reconstructive and a third that exploits. Who benefits from extreme close ups of a tear-stained Amy? It’s the shot the paps would’ve killed for in 2011. Minimal screen time is gifted Amy’s bulimia and only rarely in the film is it suggested that she may suffer from depression. Instead, Amy is presented as a lifelong teenager: sweary, petulant, naive and hormonal. Strip away the nuance in her story and what’s left is that tale of a young woman orchestrating her own demise. Such an angle doesn’t even scratch the surface.