‘I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes…’
Amy Winehouse was an incredible talent who was also incredibly troubled. She struggled with stage fright, alcohol and drug addiction and bulimia. While it’s nobody’s fucking business, the public perception of Winehouse, originating from insidious and ghoulish tabloid newspapers, is that she was in a toxic relationship with her on-off husband Blake Fielder-Civil, she was controlled by her father Mitch and that these issues ultimately led to her tragic death at the rock ‘n’ roll approved age of 27. Back to Black somehow manages to barely explore any of this throughout its two-hour run time…
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film charts the career of Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) from singing alone in her bedroom to worldwide success and then oblivion. Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), here presented as some kind of manic-pixie-dream-boy crossed with the artful dodger, is neither antagonist nor doting husband but rather some confused mixture of the two. The same is true for Mitch Winehouse (Eddie Marsan). Are we supposed to sympathise with this character or not? This is never clear. And this points towards the biggest problem with Back to Black – it doesn’t know what it wants to say about its subject.
Much has been said of Abela’s performance in the lead role. It’s a brave move to sing live but Abela pulls it off in spades but elsewhere she is saddled with some truly cringeworthy dialogue. Matt Greenhalgh’s script is bad. There are huge plot holes. The dialogue is corny. There is a weird insistence that it was Winehouse’s obsession with bearing a child that led to her drinking despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s a shame because the performances are good, Abela and O’Connell are genuinely great together, and it’s frustrating that the film happening around them can’t match their raw energy.
Back to Black is not a bad film. It’s well-acted, competently shot and remains compelling throughout but it is a bad Amy Winehouse biopic. As journalist and friend to Winehouse Katie Hind commented, “Amy would have hated this movie”.
