Back To Black review: Cash-grab biopic doesn’t bother disguising itself
The late, great Amy Winehouse is treated merely like another property to exploit
Film Reviews Back to Black
Since the blockbuster success of the Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, a music biopic gold rush has been underway in Hollywood. Some of the resulting films—made as they are with the participation of the artist, or more often their estate—have found room for genuine creative flare (Rocketman, Elvis); more have been uninspired (Respect, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Bob Marley: One Love), the filmmakers undoubtedly straitjacketed by the twofold restriction of the paint-by-numbers biopic format and the involvement of the music rights holders in the development process. (Rare is the officially authorized biopic that wishes to arrive at a truly unvarnished portrait of an artist.) Back To Black, director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s take on the Amy Winehouse story, might be the poorest yet of Hollywood’s post-Rhapsody bios.
Absent much vision or verve, Back To Black won’t quiet your nagging suspicion that it exists chiefly to cash in on the name of a dead artist, with all the potential box office as well as record and other ancillary sales to be made from mining the brand. No different from many a recent music biopic in that regard, the problem with Back To Black is that hardly anybody involved can muster the effort to disguise it.
Taylor-Johnson’s film begins in working-class Camden Town, London in 2002, when Winehouse was 18. Filling us in via flatly expository dialogue, Amy (Marisa Abela) and her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville) explain that Amy is an aspiring musician with a rebellious spirit and a fondness for jazz. “I ain’t no Spice Girl,” Amy tells the record label suits who subsequently sign her, promising to make her a star. But she will get the same cookie-cutter rise-and-fall biopic narrative applied before to countless musicians: Back To Black’s Amy will achieve enormous success followed by a crashing fall, her troubles foreshadowed in lines such as “Having a spliff’s like having a cup of tea” and “You like the bad boys, Amy Winehouse.”
Winehouse’s story is so recent and was so thoroughly covered in her lifetime that Back To Black was always going to have it tough justifying its own existence. No film is “too soon” if it can excavate deeper truths or find a fresh angle on a familiar story. But Back To Black does neither, the script—from Matt Greenhalgh, writer of 2007’s Ian Curtis biopic Control, a notable triumph in a hard-to-crack genre—having a sub-Wikipedia-level grasp on events and, worse, next to no insight into who Winehouse was as a person.
The basic bullet-point details are related: that partner (and eventually husband) Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) was an obsessive love for Winehouse; the pair experienced a very public descent into drug addiction; Amy’s father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), was a proud if somewhat ineffectual parent. (For some, that last point may not be emphasized enough in the film, which was made with the approval of the real Mitch Winehouse, now administrator of his late daughter’s estate.) There’s scant life in the telling, though. The mostly staid direction from Taylor-Johnson fails even to sell the music, with sequences in which Abela-as-Amy performs the hits expressing little of the dark allure of Winehouse’s wry neo-soul.
A recreation of Winehouse’s infamous 2008 Glastonbury set makes an impact, Taylor-Johnson’s camera staying fixed on the inebriated Amy as she struggles through a performance of “Me & Mr. Jones” while attempting to interact with the screaming crowd. There are regrettably few scenes that attempt to put us in Winehouse’s headspace like this, to give an impression of what it was like to be in the eye of a media storm as Winehouse was at her height. As for what inspired such distinct and personal music, what psychological factors might have led Winehouse into addiction and a toxic relationship, or what might explain any of the many demons that seemed to plague her, Back To Black shows next to no curiosity.
As with Bohemian Rhapsody and Freddie Mercury, and as with so many recent music biopics and their subjects, Back To Black doesn’t want to uncover the human being behind the icon. Instead, the film makes Winehouse almost saintly. There are glimpses of cruelty in the Amy Winehouse of Back To Black, but the film ultimately presents her as a martyr, tragically destroyed by fame, as well as a genius whose craft is left mysterious to us—the iconic image only ossified further.
This gives Abela precious little character to play, leaving the Industry star adrift for much of the movie. The uniformly reliable Marsan and Manville can’t locate much personality in their parts, either, the screenplay sketching Dad and Nan only as undefined salt-of-the-earth types. Only the ever-vital O’Connell can find a pulse in his role, the much-vilified Blake lent a wide boy charm, even a grotty pathos by the actor. O’Connell is a blessing for Back To Black, and a welcome lively presence in the film’s baggiest patch, as Amy and Blake violently break up, make up, take drugs, and violently split again. The film has so little perspective on any of this, meanwhile, that it ends up doing little more than gawp.
If Back To Black does have a point to make—if it has any perspective at all—it’s that the media, not addiction or any of the other issues that the singer had roiling under the hood, finally drained the life out of Amy Winehouse. One effective scene finds Amy and Mitch having a quiet moment in a greasy spoon diner, the pair’s faces flickering with the relentless camera flashes of paparazzi waiting outside the window. It’s a point made without a hint of irony, the film making minimal effort to understand Amy Winehouse—what made her tick, or indeed even what made her great—while carrying out what would seem its primary purpose: Treating a late, great musician as a property to exploit.
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In London, posters for this film have been graffitied so they read ‘Back to Whitewash’
I thought the trailer for this looked particularly awful. I wondered if I was partly biased because I’m not a fan of her music, but it seems the movie is as bad as it looked.
Seems like most of the drama in her life came from being severely fucked up most of the time, so I’m not surprised that if her family wanted to scrub much of that from the story then there wasn’t a whole lot left to hang a story around.
Just the makeup and costume and hair designs for the lead look so…clean and pretty. I’m not a particular fan but even I looked at it and went, she looked a little more individualistic than THAT.
She struck me as someone who hit the scene already in pretty rough shape, but was immensely talented and got by on that until the rest caught up with her.
Besides being a cliche, a line like “I ain’t no spice Girl” is pretty ironic given that the Spice Girls’ movie – for all its many faults – wasn’t an anonymous biopic.
Should just get Lisa Adam to do an Amy Housewine parody flick.
Was it something she actually said at any point? Because it seems like such a forced thing. By the time Amy Winehouse rose to prominence the Spice Girls weren’t even a thing anymore!
i really wonder how successful this will be. i presume most winehouse fans are old/young enough to remember the reality, and wouldn’t support what appears to be such a milquetoast take. i can understand how a mids bob marley movie can make 200 million dollars and on the flipside i can understand how a bonkers elvis movie can make 300 million dollars…this kind of reminds me of notorious.update: tracking for a 4-6 million dollar opening weekend…what’s the point?
what’s the point?The producers thought there would be enough goodwill to make them rich and the estate is happy to take all the licensing fees and hope that it sparks a surge in interest in her music. So money (mostly on the estate’s side) and various levels of delusion (mostly on the producers side).
what’s the point?the A.V. Club
I think you answered your own question when you mentioned how well the Bob Marley and Elvis movies did despite being savaged by the critics. You can say the same for the Elton John biopic. This will follow the same trajectory and do even better once it hits streaming. The die hard fans will pay to watch, even the casuals who liked one or two or her songs will. People actually like these biopics and pay to see them.
well my point was more that those artists have much more outsized, decades-longer legacies and more songs. i was saying ‘well i can understand a bad bob marley making money, because of marley’s legacy, i can’t say the same thing about a bad amy winehouse movie’ specifically because of the timelines and age of the fanbase here.
Winehouse was a big deal in the UK and Europe where she’s still pretty beloved, and with a lot of millennials as a whole. Not on par with Bob Marley obviously, but good enough that this movie will probably do pretty well. Especially as I said, once it goes on the streaming networks.
It’s an understatement to say I have a hard time comparing the legacies of Marley and Elvis to Winehouse’s. Marley was more than just a reggae star, he was the most powerful person in Jamaica at a time of major upheaval and a political force. Elvis…well c’mon. Even John allowed more warts to be shown in Rocketman, which made it a bit more compelling. And of course his stuff has been on radio for 50 years. People liked two or three of Winehouse’s songs but all that’s known about her by all but a small set of fans is that she drank and drugged herself to death at a tragically young age. I don’t see much of an audience here.
You’re having a hard time because you missed the point that I made to the OP several times that i’ll repeat again: no she’s not on the level of Elvis or Marley, but she’s still very popular and beloved enough in the UK and Europe (there is a permanent statue and memorial of her in London) to warrant a biopic of her that’ll probably do modestly well in theatres and streaming. Are you a millenial in the UK that listens to pop/rock? No? Then of course it’s off your radar. This is for them.
Yeah, I feel like this is not going to do well (and the opening tracking suggests as much). I was an enormous Winehouse fan (still am I suppose) and I don’t really understand the appeal of this movie (as advertised or as described). If it was some very personal deep dive into her as a human being, maybe I’d feel like it has something to offer. But it appears to just be basically a headline retelling.
Honestly I think it’s because her estate hated the Oscar winning documentary and wanted to put a film out there that didn’t make Mitch Winehouse look like the exploitative and enabling piece of shit that he was in real life. As a huge Amy Winehouse fan I cannot imagine there are many fans out there that have any interest in this dreck.
i’ll buy it as a PR move for sure.
The documentary Amy was good, so I’ll probably stick with having seen that.
I’ve sworn off biopics, because they are never as good as documentaries on the same subject. I’d rather just watch the documentary.
I don’t mean to sound snide but this woman’s entire career came and went and suddenly there’s biopics and docs about her and I’m just like “Wait, what? Who is this?”
Then I read up and she was, apparently, really famous. But I swear to god the Matrix just conjured her out of thin air, I barely recall seeing anything about her until she died.
Maybe I’m just not into…whatever music she sings. Jazz? Soul? Soul. I’m gonna go with soul.
Again – not meaning to be snide, I recognize she was beloved. It’s just insane to me that I never noticed.
Back to Black is a really good album, you should check it out.
One of my life’s greatest minor annoyances is that I left Back In Black in the CD player of a rental car in Las Vegas, and only realised when I got back to Britain and opened the case.
Amy Winehouse was extremely popular when she was alive. “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good” were all huge hits, and she had many other well known songs including “Back to Black” and her cover of “Valerie” with Mark Ronson.These songs were kind of everywhere, you could hear them really without even trying. I wasn’t a Winehouse “fan”, but still was well aware of all of the above songs. Her death was not exactly surprising, as her struggles with addiction made her popular paparazzi fare for much of her short career.It’s pretty odd to not have heard about her honestly. She got lots of airplay on pop stations so it’s not like you wouldn’t have known because her music was some obscure genre. Like most music that gets big, it was pop music, though with a lot of jazz flare.
I’ve heard of her, just didn’t realize how big she was until after her death, and even then, it was more of a passing “Oh that’s too bad.” And now there’s biopics and I’m like “Oh, she was huge.” Which she was – just not in my circles, I guess!
I think the key is what someone said earlier, that her career was actually really short, and, though she had a definite following in the US, she never was what you’d call “America-famous”. I was aware of her, and kinda recognized her song “Back in Black”, and definitely read about her troubles as they were happening. And I even remember that there were other singers who were promoted as being like her, so she was definitely influential.
Stop saying ‘flare’. In the review, and in this comment. Jesus F’ing Christ, it’s ‘Flair’. FLAIR. Wtf. I realize this could be autocorrect, but Proofread, for gosh’ sake
Fuck’s sake dude, it’s a comment on the internet. You’re not paying me, or grading me, so why don’t you calm it down a little.
How old are you, out of curiosity? Not trying to rag on you at all, to be very clear. It’s easy for me to imagine someone who was, say, high school age or younger from ‘06-’11 – or, alternatively, someone middle-aged (or older still) in the same period just not catching her. She was enormously, globally famous, but it was pretty contained (on account of her death) to that five year period. And only like 2-3 of those years was she consistently active as a performer (if I’m remembering right).I don’t remember when the bottom really fell out, I think 2008 (in terms of her career appearing dragged or stalled due to addiction – dwindling live performances, no new material being released). So it’s also easy to imagine someone missing her if that wasn’t their kind of music or age demo. Or if they were just very busy in life between, like 2006 and 2009 (by way of example, after my three years of law school I came to realize that I had become incredibly, insanely tuned out of pop culture during that period, especially new popular music).
I graduated college in ‘07 and all throughout college and my mid-20’s (and…for the entirety of my life), never really listened to pop music. So that’s probably why.
ESPECIALLY back then I never listened to the radio or sought out pop music at all. It was all hip-hop and electronic back then.
so what is exactly is the big mystery, you said you didn’t listen to pop music so who gives a shit if you haven’t heard of pop musicians?
Assuming you’re American, she kinda died before she was able to hit a true cultural escape velocity a la your Madonnas or Britneys. I feel like if you didn’t listen to mainstream radio between maybe 2006-2009 it was possible to completely miss her. (Probably a different case in the UK though—sounds like their poisonous tabloid culture made her inescapable over there.)
“Rehab” was her only top 40 hit in the US, so people who stick to top 40 radio only may have not known much about her as well.
Yeah, I graduated college in 2004. I mostly stuck to college/indie rock in this period, and while I rarely listened to pop radio, she got some crossover on college stations and some indie rock spaces as something out of the ordinary in the pop world – perhaps part of the indie pop genre that was just starting to be a thing. I’ve always loved jazz and American songbook/standards, so I ended up buying her albums based on Rehab and Back to Black. In fact, Back to Black ended up being the last album I ever bought on CD.But she was already down the rabbit hole with addiction and I never got a chance to see her live as a result.There is a tribute band to her – The Amy Winehouse Experience – and frankly they should have gotten the singer from that band to do the singing in this movie. I think she’s about as old as Amy Winehouse would be if Amy were still alive though.
She was very huge here in the US, even if it was a bit after her success in the UK. I recall there being a lot of buzz after she performed “Rehab” on Letterman and the MTV Music Awards in 2007-2008. It was one of those “who is this amazing throwback of a musical creature?” hit people over the head at a time when pop music was dominated by studio royalty like Justin Timberlake and Rihanna.
Her success helped Daptone Records’s 60s soul horn throwback artists like Sharon Jones (who’s backup band, the Dap Kings, backed up Winehouse), Charles Bradley, Budos Band get some attention. She certainly wasn’t a typical pop star, she was a throwback and she was unapologetically messy.
After that her music could be heard every where, but she drifted infamously into the tabloids and unfortunately it was a pretty rapid decent. Small body of work for a biopic, for sure, but 100 minute movies like short tragedies more than living to an old age with a massive songbook.
No great loss. One less crackhead in the world.
I barely knew of her existence. I’d heard bits of the rehab song, but I didn’t care for the aesthetic, the style or her voice. The radio stations in my town are shit so we miss a lot anyway. Her music gave a lot of people joy and her passing was tragic. I’m not surprised this movie isn’t worthy of her. The only music biopic I’d recommend is Rocketman.
She was very much like early Adele – incredible, soulful pipes that grabbed music fans across genres. I’m a superficial pop fan at best but was blown away by Rehab and a few of the other Back to Black songs. But by the time Winehouse was famous in the U.S. she was already a complete wreck and never had much of a chance to be seen as more than a super-talented hardcore party girl who wore a ton of eye makeup. Honestly I’m surprised there’s enough material to make even this feather-light biopic.
Isn’t this the movie that tries to paint a lot of her heartache as the result of being baby-crazy?
They need to stop having the audacity to make music biopics when Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story exists.
The wrong keed died.
Walk Hard has definitely ruined most music biopics for me. I have no idea if it’s true to life, but I understand there actually is a scene where they try to make her go to rehab which then inspires her to pen the song. That just makes me think: “Don’t you dare write a song about this Dewey!”
For a long while people claimed, not without reason, that Walk Hard killed the genre. I guess enough time has elapsed.
I really loved it for that, how the biopic tropes it skewered were as OLD as Hollywood biopics themselves!* Especially the foreshadowing, like when his mother says “Nobody never died of no little dizziness”, and you know instantly that she’s going to die of one of her dizzy spells.*I’m talking about the longer version, which was imo a MUCH BETTER MOVIE than the theatrically released version. Jokes and situations were given time to develop and breathe, like the aforementioned “dizzy spell” foreshadowing.
I also love the montage of his descent into sex and drugs has a part where he literally declares “ah, this is the dark period”. I understand that this is mostly a byproduct of trying to jam a satisfying story arc into a two hour movie (or in your example trying to add storytelling techniques, symbolism or motifs) but that movie just made me hyper aware of those tropes.
“’Ullo, luvs. Wot you doin’ back ‘ere, eh?”“We’re doing CRACK COCAINE, Amy! And you don’t want none of this shit!”
SPEAK ENGLISH, RONNIE! WE AIN’T SCIENTISTS!
Just go see The Amy Winehouse Experience if they ever tour near you. They’re fantastic.
Trailer looked like absolute, paint-by-numbers dogshit. Pass.
“So did you get me Marissa Tomei, Jerry O’Connell, Eddie Murphy, and Leslie Mann like I asked?”“Well… basically.”
Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan, Lesley Manville
If the answer is Jerry O’Connell, it’s not a very good question.
The “porn parody” title potential for this movie is just about infinite, but I’ll leave that to somebody else.
Holy shit, a film wants to make money? Those monsters!
Wow, the guy who wrote Control wrote this? What a bummer, that film was incredible, it definitely doesn’t fall into that traditional music biopic format, I think. What a downgrade.