British singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse would have turned 41 this year. In honor of the woman whose voice is part of our collective soundtrack (“Rehab” is one of mine), I decided to stream Back to Black, the biopic directed by British filmmaker and photographer Sam Taylor-Johnson. Although the media mostly trashed the film, I suspended my disbelief and hoped it would be a fitting tribute to a unique talent.
It wasn’t.
According to the official synopsis, the film, on Prime Video, is meant to be an “unapologetic look at the woman behind the phenomenon and the relationship that inspired one of the most legendary albums of all time.” It’s supposed to be a “never-before-seen glimpse” of Winehouse’s rise to fame. Instead, Back to Black is more schadenfreude than the real story of the tragic dissolution of a young, talented artist and the people who aided and abetted it.
Five minutes into it, I realize it smacks of a cliched, English version of a flawed Hollywood biopic with all the accouterments – black winged eyeliner, beehives, drug-fueled outbursts, and blood-stained pink ballet pumps. But worse than that, the “glimpse” is voyeuristic. We get a front-row seat into the soap opera rendition of the self-destruction of the Nancy and Syd Vicious-like couple that was Winehouse (Marisa Abela) and the man who inspired the album, her husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell).
The film is the mirror opposite of the brilliant and raw Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy. Instead, Back to Black manipulates Amy’s intense battles with addiction to build a sappy drama. It takes a problematic love story and sugarcoats it. Taylor-Johnson fails to correctly document what the singer endured at the hands of her fame-hungry father, Mitch Winehouse, her management team, her paramour Fielder-Civil, and ultimately the press and public.
Winehouse’s story is a complicated one. If told honestly, it would be hard to watch. It’s not the stuff of meet-cutes or fairy tales. The British singer died of alcohol toxicity at 27 in 2011 after a life and career haunted by addiction, bulimia, depression, and self-harm. “The (crack) pipe in one fist, the lighter in the other,” as friend and fellow British singer/songwriter Pete Doherty, who also had a substance use disorder, described her in an interview. He wrote Flags from the Old Regime as a tribute to Amy. In it, he wrote, “The fame they stoned you with / You soldiered it / And you made your fortune / But you broke inside.”
But, back to the film. Supposedly, it tries to “bring the artistry back to Amy and her legacy as an incredible songwriter,” Abela said in an interview on Late Night with Stephen Colbert. “She is the protagonist of her own story again. She is not a victim.” It doesn’t even come close.
What Taylor-Johnson (known for her controversial 2009 film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon) spends a lot of time doing is rehashing everything we already know about Amy’s relationships with Mitch (Eddie Marsen), her Nan (played beautifully by Leslie Manville), and, of course, Blake – who comes off as not such a bad bad-boy. The film’s other evil protagonists are her rapacious management (which, in light of the Puff Daddy story, is all the more poignant) and a sexist UK press that hounded Winehouse and still does, more than 13 years after her death.
I don’t see Amy’s story as the film portrays it – a “good girl” falling in love with a “bad boy,” which destroys her. I see it as two damaged people meeting, causing each other untold harm (which happens when you meet your dark-side-of-the-moon soulmate), and tragedy ensuing. And I certainly can’t see – as Back to Black more than hints at – that the cause of her depression was the inability to have children. For a woman who wrote and sang the blues like Billie Holiday and Etta James, the suffering went much deeper than that.
I didn’t hate the film as much as other people did. Just take a look at social media – it’s brutal. I enjoyed parts of it, especially Manville as the grandmother (the scene where she is putting the finishing touches on Amy’s beehive is incredibly touching). I even found Avela’s rendition of Amy a valiant effort and O’Connell a believable Blake, although a little too buff for someone taking Class A drugs before his morning coffee. Still, it didn’t make me love it either.
I found it trite, exploitative, and, ultimately, profoundly sad. Was Amy a victim or the main character of her own story? Was she a broken doll, hounded by the cruel and predatory record industry, UK media, and her father, or a woman unprepared for the onslaught of monumental fame who struggled with her demons – until she couldn’t?
It is clear from the start that Amy needs help with her drinking and drug consumption and that she is fragile mentally and physically. If only she had gone to rehab that first time when her manager tried to intervene, maybe she would be alive today. But her father said she was fine and didn’t have to go.
Maybe then, the album Back to Black wouldn’t have happened, and she wouldn’t have won countless awards, including a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album, but other fantastic music might have come out of her after she got clean. It’s a subject the film doesn’t touch, and it is a shame because it is central to Amy’s finality.
Watching it makes me wonder why we catapult people into ultra-mega stardom only to rip them apart when they show their humanity. And what part do we, the public, play in it all?
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when Blake asks Amy (after they have reunited) how she has been dealing with her out-of-control fame.
“I get my alcoholic buzz on, go out, give them a show. They love it,” she answers. “Stupid, pissed-up Amy gives them exactly what they need to get paid… I’m a free breakfast, lunch, and dinner for those cunts.”
Winehouse was, as she says in the movie, “an old school girl living now,” just one that could sing like Ella Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughn. And that’s the tragedy – she couldn’t find purpose in her God-given gift. It helped her escape a black place but wasn’t enough to save her. And it’s insulting that filmmakers still prey on a talented woman’s sad narrative for supposed art.
When Amy was 12, she wrote in her scholarship application to London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School that she wanted “people to hear my voice and forget their troubles for just five minutes.” We do, Amy, we still do.
