Back to Black
‘I want to be a singha,’ a young Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela, HBO's 'Industry') tells her dad’s side of her North London Jewish family. Her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville, "Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris"), Amy’s ‘style icon,’ thrills when she takes the stage at Ronnie Scott’s, the intimate jazz club whose owner Cynthia dated back in her heyday. Happy with her first album ‘Frank’ charting 13th on the UK charts, the talented jazz artist who never aspired to wealth and fame would be crushed by those very things by the time she released her global smash LP “Back to Black.”
Laura's Review: C+
What a missed opportunity. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson ("Nowhere Boy," "Fifty Shades of Grey") knows how to craft a film and has found the perfect star in Abela, who made a believer out of someone who was unconvinced by the movie’s trailer, but writer Matt Greenhalgh ("Control," "Nowhere Boy") has done a great disservice to the late artist in making Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O'Connell, "Unbroken") her entire raison d’ être. Winehouse’s dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan, "Happy-Go-Lucky," SHO's 'Ray Donovan') is more sympathetic from what we saw in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary “Amy,” while her first manager and great friend Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan) and friend and roommate Juliette (Harley Bird) are given short shrift. Her second manager Raye Cosbert’s (Ansu Kabia) contribution to her decline isn’t mentioned at all. If we’re to believe Greenhalgh, Amy was undone after a long stretch of sobriety on hearing her ex had had a child with another woman.
Greenhalgh goes the route of using Amy’s lyrics to tell her story, but it isn’t her whole story, as attested to by music supervisor Iain Cooke’s non-Winehouse contributions. The first song we hear her sing is ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ with her dad before she sings one of her own, ‘What Is It About Men,’ about him and it’s not too flattering (and yes, Abela does her own singing and while it’s not a perfect replica of Winehouse, what could be – it’s still more impressive than lip syncing would have been). After establishing her distress over her parents’ split, Amy’s career begins to take off when she meets Shymansky and loses her first boyfriend, Chris Taylor (Ryan O'Doherty), when he learns she wrote ‘Stronger Than Me’ about him – cruel, but good for a laugh with the guy who’d sign her to Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, the company she’d inform ‘I ain’t no Spice Girl.’
Taylor-Johnson largely sets her film in Amy’s Camden stomping grounds and it’s at The Good Mixer pub where she first laid eyes on the heavily tattooed production assistant (‘So you make tea?’) who appears to be her soul mate. The director and her actors really make that heady rush of love-at-first-sight palpable – it’s what follows that is problematic, the man who introduced the drug-averse Winehouse to heroin presented here as the sensible one who recognized the toxic codependency of their relationship.
But “Back to Black” still has much to recommend it, from Abela’s sympathetic performance and recreations of Amy’s 2008 Glastonbury set, where she tried to convince the crowd to support her jailed husband before being lowered to dance along the crowd barrier to her London live feed appearance at the 2008 Grammys. Leslie Manville is another huge asset as Amy’s idolized and empathetic grandmother while Marsan and O'Connell do their assignments rehabilitating their characters. As Amy’s mom, Juliet Cowan is almost a background extra, Blake’s ex Becky (Therica Wilson-Read, TV's 'The Witcher') oddly more of a focal point.
Taylor-Johnson leads a largely female crew, cinematographer Polly Morgan’s ("Lucy in the Sky," TV's 'Legion') artful use of close-ups punching up a romance oft told in tattoos. Costume designer PC Williams (“Polite Society”) and hair and make-up designer Peta Dunstall (2024’s “Road House”) recreate the well-documented looks of the time, Amy’s cat eyes growing more extreme as her beehive reflects her addictions. Music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s ("The Proposition," "Hell or High Water") score is fragile, delicate and wistful, as is their original 'Song for Amy' which closes the film.
While Amy’s bulimia, alcoholism, and hounding by the press, all of which contributed to her demise, are represented here, the emphasis on her amour fou as her undoing is a frustrating flaw that undermines the woman the film should be celebrating.
Focus Features releases "Back to Black" in theaters on 5/17/24.
