The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.
Nine years ago, we had “Amy,” the probing and thoughtful exploration of singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse in documentary form, bringing us through the stages of her life and career to her death in July 2011. As with any documentary that doubles as a personality profile, it somewhat felt like scratching the surface of a pretty amazing life. However, that feeling was nicely quashed by how comprehensive and sympathetic its portrait of Winehouse was. There was no apotheosis of the late, great soul artist in Asif Kapadia’s film, though, and director Sam Taylor-Johnson attempts this once again in “Back to Black,” which resonates only as a dramatic narrativization of what we saw in the documentary.
It would barely matter that this material is a reconstruction of another work. Some may not have seen the earlier film, and many others still may not be aware of the career highs, personal lows, and romantic entanglements that almost undoubtedly led to Winehouse’s premature death, the result of alcohol poisoning, at the age of 27. That age is a significant number in the music world, following the deaths of so many others – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, to name only a tiny handful. Indeed, legend has it that Winehouse guessed during her final years that she would join the unluckiest of clubs. Instead of exploring anything the film’s version of Amy might think or believe about herself, Taylor-Johnson gives us the broadest possible interpretation of a life.
As played by Marisa Abela, whose performance is at least solid enough to make one forget that she looks nothing like her real-life counterpart, and written by Matt Greenhalgh, Amy is yet another victim of what someone much cleverer than this critic once called the “music-biopic-industrial complex.” For the filmmakers here, the real Winehouse’s life is merely a string of events to be reenacted or exploited if that doesn’t quite go far enough. That means the film’s best is the early stretches, in which we see Amy just trying out some songs on her guitar and listening to the R&B and hip-hop of her youth. There is nothing overtly pretentious or unseemly about these scenes because they allow Amy to speak (and sing) for herself.
We likely remember what came with her sudden rise to fame, though. Her first album was produced under Simon Fuller, the English music career tycoon whose sponsorship of the Spice Girls and creation of a mega-franchise of televised singing competitions (several of which are still ongoing as of May 2024) have especially made him a household name in London at the turn of the century. We remember those contralto vocals, soulful, purposeful, and effortlessly complex in only the way a complete natural could exhibit them. When Blake (Jack O’Connell) arrives on the scene, we can essentially set our watch to the ensuing madness of a second album release, awards glory that she genuinely did not expect, a growing dependency upon drugs and alcohol, and a high-profile rehabilitation induced by her gruffly understanding father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan).
If we cannot set our watch on these things, which happened with a sense of terrible inevitability in real life that has been translated to an exasperated variety on the screen, then that’s okay. Greenhalgh has structured the entire film as something of a jukebox semi-musical set to all the big hits that we remember and love – the ditty about avoiding rehab, the soliloquy about Blake’s abandonment of her for his ex-girlfriend, and a handful of other ballads chosen as singles off the album that shares the movie’s title. Abela does a good job handling singing duties throughout (indeed, the final song used on the soundtrack could qualify as an uncanny impersonation), although one wonders whether the old rule about letting the actor do their own singing could and should have been broken in this case.
That’s the thing about these music biopics: If every step of the production, from its conception to the result, feels off-kilter and questionable, is it necessary for anyone to have made it? It’s one of the unknowable questions about the artistic impulse. With “Back to Black,” which gives us nothing else to ponder about its subject, one wonders what the infamously prickly Winehouse herself would say about how she is portrayed and perceived here, and one can be pretty sure she’d balk.
In Theaters Friday, May 17th
