Review of 'Back to Black': Amy Winehouse's film is superficial and reductionist

It would be a challenging task for any filmmaker or actor to depict in biopic form the enormous talent, unique style, and absolutely devastating downfall of soul singer Amy Winehouse. To quote one of Winehouse's most moving ballads, the effort is “a losing game” before it even begins.

Theirs is such a tragic story that Asif Kapadia limited his 2015 Oscar-winning documentary “Amy” to audio recordings of archival footage to examine Winehouse's life, never showing the faces of his interview subjects. It's like it's too painful to face it head-on: her undying gift, her destructive love story, her unapologetic personality: brilliant and drunk. Any facsimile could never come close to reality, in all its beauty and horror.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Matt Greenhalgh, who previously collaborated on the 2009 John Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy,” have persisted with the Winehouse biopic “Back to Black.” “Industry” star Marisa Abela sports her signature black beehive hairstyle and winged eyeliner to channel the doomed singer, who released the iconic new standards album “Back to Black” in 2006 and became a fixture sensationalist in the mid-aughts. Paparazzi scrupulously documented his physical and mental deterioration from drug and alcohol abuse before he died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, joining the famous “27 Club” of musicians who died at age 27.

Singing on her own and miraculously capturing the classic jazz style and timbre of Winehouse's undeniable vocal talent, Abela delivers a fully committed performance. But the film itself is a superficial portrait, recounting gossipy facts and lore about Winehouse and her troubled relationship with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil (an admittedly fantastic Jack O'Connell).

Greenhalgh's script doesn't seem at all interested in understanding Winehouse psychologically, instead attributing all of her problems to her toxic, co-dependent relationship with Fielder-Civil. Many of the other men in his life, including her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), get off the hook quite easily.

The script is content to blame Amy for her own self-destructive spiral without examining the industrial context that contributed to it: the pressure to tour and perform even when she was struggling, the lack of protection and support, the media's vicious comments about her body. and appearance. Packs of paparazzi are present in the film, but “Back to Black” does not delve into who drives the desire for these sordid photos: both the media titans and their sensation-hungry audiences.

There's no curiosity about Amy in “Back to Black,” just a condescending presentation of a girl with a great voice and a bad boyfriend. The script even goes so far as to suggest that, in addition to the loss of her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), the core of Amy's pain is her unfulfilled desire to have her children. She looks longingly at young children and has inappropriate conversations with them, telling a young fan, “I wish I were your mother.” She is insultingly reductionist.

Although “Back to Black” is a somewhat unnecessary reminder of the incredible album that emerged from Winehouse's tumultuous relationship with Fielder-Civil, and Abela offers similar-sounding (if overly pronounced) vocal performances of the songs, Taylor-Johnson seeks out feel how these songs are used. She lets the first verse play, then makes the rest of the song soundtrack a montage that speeds up the story and conveniently combines certain events. Winehouse's sizzling song about a woman scorned, the album and film's title number, “Back to Black,” is completely misused in a montage, eerily linking the tune to her grandmother's death and robbing it of its emotional power. .

This isn't the first time Taylor-Johnson has cinematically flattened a hyper-controversial story that was originally covered in gore and forced media consumers to question our own relationship with a kind of dark voyeurism. She adapted James Frey’s rehab “memoir,” “A Million Little Pieces,” for similarly sanitized purposes in 2019, sanding down the rough edges and not asking any of the tough questions. Why tackle these complex stories if you're just going to boil them down to easily digestible pablum?

With a visual style that is spare and serviceable at best and a frustratingly limited emotional range, “Back to Black” never captures the beauty of Winehouse's talent, the anguish of her performances or the horror of her tragedy.

Witnessing Winehouse's fall in real time was incredibly disturbing: it was shocking to see photographs of her with Fielder-Civil, hanging, smeared with mascara and blood. We watched her deteriorate under the harsh glare of a camera flash, a burning star too bright for this world. It's a shame that the filmmakers shy away from it and prefer to stay on the surface of her story. It just goes to show that Winehouse's presence was always too big to be contained.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.