BACK TO BLACK - Mark Reviews Movies

Back to Black, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

There must be more to Amy Winehouse than the portrait of her in Back to Black. We know as much because her short life, promising career, and personal struggles with addiction were the stuff of entertainment news, tabloid rags, and alleged "comedy" for several years after her rise to fame and until her death in 2011 at the age of 27. Winehouse's fame—more specifically, how the media reveled her troubles and how some of those close to her might have exploited her celebrity status—is as much a part of her story as any biographical details, but Matt Greenhalgh's screenplay only seems to see that aspect of Winehouse's life as a minor inconvenience along a sad path toward inevitable tragedy.

It's genuinely difficult to assess this movie on its own terms, because the script and director Sam Taylor-Johnson keep Winehouse's story in the vacuum of standard biography. The movie doesn't seem curious about its subject beyond the basics.

She was a great, one-of-a-kind singer who didn't want fame but came into it anyway. She lived her life the way she wanted to, and if that included alcohol and drugs and a toxic romance, so be it, apparently.

There are attempts to explain why Winehouse may have become dependent on both legal and illicit substances, with none of them being particularly convincing. After reaching the heights of her career and the lows of her romantic life, the movie's Amy simply disappears into a blinding light. We have learned nothing we didn't already know, apart from some speculation that feels a bit specious, and it's possible an audience might know less about the real Winehouse after watching the movie.

With all of that said, this dramatization of Winehouse's short but notable career is intriguing in a few ways, particularly in how it does portray her in a sort of isolated bubble of her own experience. It seems big and limitless at first, as Amy (Marisa Abela) has nothing but potential—singing like a jazz queen from decades before her time at a family get-together, having fun with different guys but knowing her career is her first priority, writing songs about personal experiences in the basement of her mother's house, listening to stories and advice from her beloved grandmother and style icon Cynthia (Lesley Manville).

Once a record label signs her on the strength of a demo tape, the world outside her grows and starts pressing against that bubble. Soon enough, it's just Amy, her grandma, her father Mitch (Eddie Marsan), and industry people she trusts within it, and as soon as she meets Blake (Jack O'Connell), it becomes just the two of them against that world. This isn't a love story from an outsider's viewpoint, of course, but it is one inside that bubble, which keeps becoming compressed by the label's expectations, hounding paparazzi trying to get pictures of her being drunk in public, and Blake's inconsistency as a partner, as well as an enabling factor in Amy's increasing addictions.

The story plays like an intimate drama, in other words, instead of just a fictionalized highlight reel of recording sessions, concert performances, and, that odd marker of success in just about every music biography, awards ceremonies. Greenhalgh and Taylor-Johnson treat their Amy as a real person, which is more than can be said of most portrayals and accounts of the real Winehouse during her life. It clearly means well, even if certain details, such as this Amy's apparent obsession with becoming a mother, don't quite add up and others that would seem vital, such as what an onslaught of critical or negative or downright insulting press attention must have done to Winehouse, are mainly ignored.

The material is helped immensely by Abela's performance, which, first and foremost, must be commended for how much the actor sounds like Winehouse during the musical numbers. The singer's voice is one of the more distinct and recognizable of recent times, and as soon as Abela hits the first few notes of a rendition of "Fly Me to Moon" in the opening scene, the impersonation is uncanny. It's not just hollow mimicry, though. There's passion behind the belting and a sense of jazzy improvisation to the vibrato, and it stands up to the scant moments of the real Winehouse's recordings on the soundtrack.

Outside of the music, the performance is quite solid, too, presenting Amy as a troubled but inherently sympathetic figure. That, obviously, brings us back to the issues with the screenplay, which reduces those troubles either to a blunt fact (Amy's an alcoholic because she is and starts using harder drugs because Blake does) or barely to the level of armchair psychology (all the scenes of her wanting kids). Abela rises above the hollow presentation of her character.

The movie itself never does, though. Back to Black shows a basic degree of compassion and respect for its subject by seeing her as more than just her music and the tragedy of her life, but it stops far short of actually investigating and engaging with her and that tragedy.

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