MOVIE review: back to black

You know, it's no good: a review of Back to Black

Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary ‘Amy’ is a heart-rending look at a phenomenal singer and performer, battling both her demons and ultimately destructive professional and personal associations. Back To Black, a 2024 biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (A Million Little Pieces, Fifty Shades of Grey) is…something else. 

Despite the panoramic mockery of the early trailers, I went in with an open mind. Yes, lead Marisa Abela was leaning into mannerisms a little eagerly (especially with the singing), but it’s nothing that Rami Malek didn’t somehow get an Oscar for (he’s a fine actor, but Bo-Rap is far from his finest hour, IMHO). I was counting on the story and cinematography of this “impressionistic” (?) retelling of the Winehouse legend elevating things beyond fan-service karaoke.

That hope lasted around five minutes. It’s…not subtle. The first piece of information that the director wants you to know is that Amy Winehouse is not like other girls: she likes old fashioned music, not modern pop like you thought! The endless musical references arrive like Miles Davis delivering a discordant trumpet solo about an inch from your ear. “Why don’t people like jazz?!” Amy yells to her dad Mitch (a hapless Eddie Marsan), apropos of nothing. 

We meet Amy as an unknown, but within about ten minutes she’s famous. You find yourself constantly flailing for any kind emotional depth, like a third-class Titanic passenger grasping for a floating door frame. One night she’s cobbling together songs on a guitar in her bedroom, in the next scene she’s won a struggle-free bevy of international awards. The payment of dues that was so well portrayed in the documentary is just vaulted over. 

Tension with her roommate mum is hinted at, I wonder what the story is th-DOESN’T MATTER DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT because we’re already half way through the next scene. It’s a disorienting, breathless race to get to her indie meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), punctuated with cloying scenes with her ex-singer grandmother (Lesly Manville), who drops names like they’re covered in vegetable oil ("I sang wiv 'em all!").

Here’s where things get even murkier, where The Estate of Amy Winehouse starts to make its unwelcome presence felt. Blake and Mitch are historically known to be predatory, exploitative, and self-furthering. Here, though, Blake is presented as a lovable, bright-eyed rogue. He may be an addict, but he has Amy’s best interests at heart. As for Mitch, you may as well have him blunder around the set with a NUMBER ONE DAD mug. 

(One quick tangent: Blake romances Amy by playing her 'The Leader of the Pack' by The Shangri-La's. Movie Amy has never heard this song before. One of the most famous songs of the 1960s, a decade she is supposedly obsessed with. Am I nitpicking? Maybe. But...what?!)

Amy and Blake are set up as kind of a Sanitized Sid and Non-Threatening Nancy. They’re chased by a benign, Keystone Cops gaggle of paparazzi, and when Blake goes to prison (IRL he got two years for a violent physical attack) he immediately blooms into the patron saint of rehabilitation.

Other than that, Amy does a couple of gigs (many major events are just ignored), she moves house and, oh, she has a caged songbird DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU? GET IT? DO YOU? The final scene is beatific, Amy in a pastoral rehab center, seemingly canonized and almost euphoric. It's awful on multiple levels.  

Thrashing inconsequentially in the clichéd swamp of musical biopics, Back to Black sinks into the mire. It’s a movie more concerned with washing the blood from the hands of the living, rather than celebrating a talent, or analyzing the circumstances that resulted in her tragic death. (PO)