Does ‘Back to Black’ Do Amy Winehouse Dirty?
Check out my quick review of Back to Black on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and follow me on Letterboxd to see what I’m watching.
One of the hardest parts about making a biopic for a deceased musician is that you have to balance giving audiences a truthful portrayal of a sometimes flawed person with appeasing the estate who holds the rights to the music. Without the officially licensed songs, you end up with a Jackie Jormp-Jomp situation.
We saw with both Bohemian Rhapsody and the more recent Bob Marley: One Love that it’s not easy to capture the real life of an iconic person in a way that doesn’t upset someone, particularly when the superstar in question is someone who struggled with issues like substance abuse or infidelity.
So now we find ourselves with Back to Black, a biopic about the life of the phenomenally talented and tragically troubled Amy Winehouse.
Anyone who remembers pop culture in the 2000s remembers Winehouse as both a unique and amazing singer as well as a tabloid target for her struggles with drugs and alcohol. Her album, Back to Black is iconic and her voice was able to blend emotion and modern flare with a classic, jazzy sound that rocketed her to the top of the charts. But she was also just as famous for her tumultuous relationship with her husband Blake Fielder-Civil and her sometimes erratic behavior on the streets of London.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black presents Winehouse, played here by Marisa Abela, as a talented rebel who made it big in music, fell in love with the wrong guy (Jack O’Connell), and had a tragic and untimely death. It feels like a very hollow telling of this story after 2015’s Amy, a documentary that presented her as a far more three-dimensional person than what we get here.
The substance abuse isn’t completely glossed over, but the enabling from her family or handlers is downplayed. Also under-represented is the relentless hounding she received from the paparazzi and gossip sites. Back in that era, there wasn’t a day that went by when Winehouse wasn’t being cruelly mocked by the likes of Perez Hilton and other gossip bloggers.
Instead, we get Winehouse as a rebellious Disney princess who feels music with every cell of her body and who’s just a little too wild for her own good. The actors do what they can but the screenplay from writer Matt Greenhalgh feels like it was created from a quick browse of her Wikipedia page and a Spotify playlist.
Everything feels polished up and it becomes so abundantly clear that her estate had a big say in how this story was presented.
And I get it. These movies rarely show the crust of a person, especially not if you want to score those coveted music rights for your soundtrack. They’re not going to point fingers at her father, at enablers, at any of the circumstances we saw lead up to tragedy in Amy.
So in the end, Back to Black feels shallow, and I couldn’t help but think that Winehouse deserved better from a feature film about her life.
