1 of 5 | Marisa Abela performs Amy Winehouse’s music in “Back to Black.” Photo courtesy of Focus Features
LOS ANGELES, May 13 (UPI) — Marisa Abela singing in Back to Black, in theaters Friday, does justice to Amy Winehouse’s songs. The story, however, ultimately succumbs to the tropes of the biography genre.
As a young woman growing up in a Jewish home (they sing Hebrew songs after dinner), Amy (Abela) is upbeat and joyous. She bops to jazz in the backseat of her father, Mitch’s (Eddie Marsan) cab or sings along with her headphones because she loves music so much.
Amy goes from playing clubs to recording her first album, Frank, after which she meets Blake (Jack O’Connell). Amy and Blake’s relationship provides the inspiration for Amy’s Back to Black album, but also precipitates her downward spiral.
The 2007 satire Walk Hard satirized the tendency of musician biopics to dwell in the artists’ succumbing to drug addiction. The comedy’s existence did not prevent subsequent films about musicians from indulging in their addictions.
The fact that Winehouse actually died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 puts the onus on the filmmakers to give this formula more depth.
Screenwriter Matt Greenhaigh and director Sam Taylor-Johnson do their best to focus at least the early part of the film on Amy’s happiness, though does not ignore the severity of her addiction.
Amy can be adorable on talk shows, as Abela recreates Winehouse’s charming appearance on Jonathan Ross’s talk show. She is genuinely smitten by Blake even though he’s in a relationship when they first meet.
Amy and Blake’s relationship was volatile because, among other reasons, they were both young. Young people in love don’t understand their feelings, overreact, lash out and, yes, drink to cope.
Yet a relationship with Blake is clearly toxic, even if he hadn’t introduced hard drugs into the house. In Back to Black, Blake can’t be a reliable, stable partner as he continues going back to old relationships, or commits crimes that take him away from Amy.
At the end of a scene in which Blake is carted off to jail, the camera rests on a shoe Amy lost in the street, milking the melodrama that this was so upsetting she couldn’t even keep her shoes on.
Once Amy and Blake break up, Back to Black goes through the more familiar motions of those films about troubled artists. To be fair, there is a lot of Winehouse’s life to cram into the remaining 75 minutes of the movie.
The evolution of Amy’s musical career is only summarized in meetings with her label about their decision not to release Frank in the U.S. and her new manager connecting her with Mark Ronson.
Likewise a montage breezes through Amy’s move to New York and a death in the family. Supporting characters like Amy’s roommate Jules and Blake’s friend Joey only exist to vocalize into what state the main characters have fallen.
Amy’s look evolves over the course of the film. She adopts her iconic beehive hairdo as an homage to the Shangri-La’s, but also loses a tooth off camera and becomes more disheveled with smudged makeup and chapped lips.
And yet, Amy still engages with an audience after drinking on stage. Her spotters do their job to make sure she doesn’t have an accident.
The film portrays Mitch as a supportive father heartbroken he can’t alleviate his daughter’s struggles. There’s not room for everything in the movie, but this seems particularly sanitized when the documentary Amy shows footage of the real Mitch forcing Amy to take photos with fans when she wanted to be left alone.
When she sings, Abela conveys the emotion on her face while she’s chanting Winehouse’s words. Abela really sang the songs too, though she probably pre-recorded the track to lip sync on set.
It is unfortunate the movie could not find a through line into Winehouse’s life to match the performance of Abela’s tribute to the late singer.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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