Back to Black
Only one question is invoked by Director Sam Taylor Johnson’s film “Back to Black,” and it will be recognized by any Amy Winehouse fan: What kind of f*ckery is this? The Camden born icon, played by Marisa Abela, was famously “just one of the girls.” She was down to earth, charming, funny and when she sang an absolutely captivating talent with a voice that seemed impossible coming out of such a small frame. Unfortunately for her and everyone else who remembers her, she was also plagued with addiction and followed mercilessly by the media until her death at 27 from alcohol poisoning in the summer of 2011.
“Back to Black” takes place during the years between 2003’s breakthrough album “Frank” and the release of the titular record in 2006. But don’t expect to learn anything about Amy Winehouse as a person or even as a musician. Taylor-Johnson’s movie written by Matt Greenhalgh only cares about Winehouse as an addict, making “Back to Black” a terrible biopic.
If there’s one thing you should be able to expect from any musician’s biographical drama film, it’s that it’ll be music-centric. While “Back to Black” does have plenty of performances where songs like “You Know I’m No Good” are belted out for big crowds, they’re used almost exclusively for simple soundtrack and pity fodder rather than essential structure. They feel like little thoughtless nudges to remind us that Amy Winehouse was a performer too, instead of just letting us see how broken she was inside already. The movie doesn’t spend any significant amount of time on showing us how either album got made, we only get minor bullet points for context around her artistry like one guitar in the bed songwriting sesh or cheeky Mark Ronson namedrop.
“Back to Black” misinterprets Amy’s legacy. The film does not show how internationally recognized she was. It doesn’t feature any of the support her city and country gave, the way they got behind her or her fame in America. It doesn’t explain why people loved her and loved her music so much. Hardly anything about her career is covered in the movie. Instead, it feels more like a montage of toxic relationships, drug use and tattoos.
Most of the on stage clips serve as indicators of sobriety issues or mourning for Blake (Jack O’Connell), her on and off boyfriend turned husband. The only clip we see of the making of Back to Black is a moment of her tearfully recording the titular track, saying “he’s killed me,” cutting hard to some undetermined time later where Amy is at peak addiction. Not even her addiction gets thoughtful narrative here it’s just something that happens off screen. It’s treated with such cut to the chase speed because, as the movie sees it. We know it happens anyway.
Abela gives an admirable effort in embodying Amy’s on stage mannerisms and idiosyncratic dancing but gesture isn’t essence, there’s always a distracting artifice to what she’s doing. Charisma and charm were almost as famous as Amy Winehouse’s voice itself, and Abela’s hollow impersonation coupled with an exaggerated accent puts us too far into copy territory for those qualities to come through naturally.
And if the film defining Amy by drug use wasn’t criminal enough, treating these struggles and eventual death as matters of fate an end bound from birth then every reach for a beer or glass of wine dramatized like a smug nod to what we know is coming should be considered capital offense against storytelling 101. From minute one our Philandering Snarky Silver Tongue Criminal To Others Love Lives Fated Victim To Own Heart is painted as just that Blake is treated like a casualty to her out of control nature’s irrepressible storm, and her father a powerless hopeful supporter despite simple biography dictating otherwise. Neither of these men can ever be fully blamed, but omitting their enabling and exacerbation of Amy’s vulnerabilities is an indignity to history itself. She is portrayed as a naive lost cause, and all the while, the music never becomes the story’s backbone. So why was this film made?
When we look back on how the media and public treated Amy with 2024 eyes, remembering our own disgust at the exploitation, comparing it to Britney and vowing to do better next time; when we hope that in death we could honor Winehouse’s story more than in life; this expectation begs for failure. While Taylor Johnson directs scenes seemingly shaking their head at oppressive paps who follow Amy everywhere she goes, her film does nothing different. There is such a gross romanticization and infantilization that it saps any life force out of this story. The same sensationalist treatment she tries to scoff at is essential to the story she has chosen to tell.
Taylor Johnson always takes an exploitative eye to Amy’s problems with drugs, making no attempt at understanding or sympathy. It turns music into nothing more than a byproduct of supposed love for pain and bad decisions, hence the main character becomes a figure of pathos.
“Back to Black” presents Amy Winehouse as a sacrificial lamb, it reduces her whole existence and work to endless drinking bouts following failed attempts at getting over heartbreaks. This is a brutal denial of selfhood that suggests she is no more than tragic person who made one great album. While her addiction cannot be divorced from her biography, treating it as though it were equivalent to her whole life while also sidelining humanity and skipping over key points in her legacy represents an offensive approach towards storytelling.
This movie could break anybody’s heart because it gets everything wrong about why people love her and if any of those people who truly loved Amy are still alive today then this film must have devastated them beyond repair. The first line said by the singer in “Back To Black” echoes throughout until its closing scene. “I wanna be remembered as a singer I want my voice remembered.” But instead of remembering anything else except for when she was at rock bottom, all we get from the movie is “too bad.”
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