Amy Winehouse is ‘Back to Black’

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In 2015, British filmmaker Asif Kapadia produced Amy, an innovative documentary on Amy Winehouse composed in large part from home movies and cellphone video. It earned many awards and drew flak from some insiders who didn’t like the way they came across. Since then, several directors planned to make a biographical picture dramatizing her career. The Amy Winehouse estate settled on British director Sam Louise Taylor-Johnson. We can assume that the resulting film, Back to Black, is the authorized version of her story.

Marisa Abela is superb as Amy, endowing the singer with many emotional colors: she’s a dutiful daughter, a lioness on the prowl, heartbroken by the death of her grandmother, thin-skinned and strong willed—and hooked on alcohol. We know how the story ends: She was found dead in 2011 from alcohol poisoning following a period of sobriety. Empathetic casting for all characters and crucial scenes well-crafted hold our attention as Amy’s life goes off the tracks like the cars of a passenger train in a slow derailment. 

“I’m a bit of an anachronism—an old-school girl living now,” Amy declares in one scene. “I ain’t no fucking Spice Girl!” she adds in another. In Back to Black, her parents encouraged her career, raising her on Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday. After the whole family sings a Jewish folk song around the living room piano, teenage Amy jumps in with “Fly Me to Moon.” One imagines she was oblivious to grunge. Back to Black portrays her musical career in a smooth and rapid ascent, fired by self-confidence and a refusal to compromise. She reached a pinnacle in 2008 when Tony Bennett, one of her heroes, opened the envelope on Grammy night and announced that she won the award for Record of the Year.

Whether Amy would have matched the interpretive powers of her models remains an open question, given her death at age 27. Her tone was often sassy and her style, vocally as well as sartorially, owed more to ‘60s girl groups than the golden age of jazz.

The love of her life, Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), brought on an emotional roller coaster of highs and steeply descending curves. Back to Black’s drop-dead scene depicts their first encounter in a London pub. Eyes meet and sparks begin to fly. He’s in wonderment upon realizing that the Amy he’s just met is Amy Winehouse, one of his favorite singers. He picks the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” on the jukebox and dances interpretively to the ‘60s hit. He’s a bad boy, a charming rogue, and like the narrator of the song, Amy is drawn to bad boys. His behavior is fueled by cocaine, but the film avoids the question of whether he introduced that drug and other harder substances to Amy’s life.  

According to the screenplay, alcohol calmed her nerves before going on national television for the first time and with stardom came greater anxiety. A pack of paparazzi pursue her with their maddening, soul-stealing snap-snap of their cameras. They hope to catch Amy at her worst moments and often succeed. She becomes a spectacle fit for the front page of the Sun or the Daily Mail. However, Back to Black simplifies Amy’s complicated personal life and downplays the bad impact of alcohol on her ability to perform.

One of the film’s strengths is to downplay moments that might lend themselves to melodrama in less skilled hands. Taylor-Johnson also does marvelous work tying Amy’s key songs into her life story. “Back to Black” vividly illustrates the pain, numbed by alcohol, of her relations with Blake. And yes, her daddy really did discourage her from going to rehab as she sang in “Rehab.”