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Back to Black ★★
Rated MA15+ 122 minutes.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Amy Winehouse had a once-in-a-lifetime voice: a deep, soulful tone that recalled smoky old-world glamour and hard-won perspective. She also had a tumultuous personal life, struggling with substance abuse, bipolar disorder and bulimia. Her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the age of 27 remains one of the most startling celebrity deaths in recent memory.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse and Jack O’Connell as Blake Fielder-Civil in Back to Black.
With the spate of music biopics in recent years – 2019’s Rocketman (Elton John), 2020’s Stardust (David Bowie), 2022’s Elvis (well, Elvis) – perhaps it was inevitable that Winehouse would eventually get the same treatment. Here it is in the hands of director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who was behind the 2009 John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy.
Yet Winehouse’s passing is still so relatively recent, and her life so complicated, that it feels like a moral grey area to take on via dramatisation – and Asif Kapadia’s lauded 2015 documentary Amy already drew on real footage and interviews to tell the story as truthfully as possible.
Add the fact that Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh cobbled it together from Winehouse’s lyrics and personal diaries, and it feels ethically dubious at best. Not to mention, can anyone sing like her?
The answer to that question, at least, is easy: no. Industry’s Marisa Abela has a fine voice, but her approximations of Winehouse’s unique cadence give the impression of someone doing pretty good karaoke.
Marisa Abela underwent an Amy “boot camp” to capture the singer’s unique style.
Winehouse is shown first as a bright young girl who loves her family (particularly her grandmother Cynthia, played by Lesley Manville) and music. She very quickly (and inexplicably) becomes famous and her punk attitude is evident. (“I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she spits.)
But Winehouse, the artist, takes a back seat to Winehouse, the girlfriend and wife, in this film. Most of the focus is on her turbulent, codependent relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), to whom she was briefly married. The break-up inspired her 2006 album Back to Black.