Sam Taylor-Johnson (2024)
My note on Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy (2015) concluded that ‘A dramatised biopic of this life will surely follow in time: it’s good that Asif Kapadia has got Amy to the screen first’. The dramatised biopic has now arrived. Another good thing about Oscar-winning Amy’s getting in ahead is that Sam Taylor-Johnson was virtually obliged to opt for a different, less obvious title than Amy for her film. Not that Back to Black is a surprising or imaginative choice but it was a great song title (for a great song) and seems right enough for the Amy Winehouse story. Working with a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh, Taylor-Johnson doesn’t tell that story in a precisely informative way. While she and her DP, Polly Morgan, give convincing texture to the various North London venues, there’s no text on screen announcing exactly where and when scenes are happening. This isn’t a problem. Most of the audience for this film will know the key facts of the Winehouse biography. What’s more, the lack of detailed chronology gets across, in effect, both the suddenness of Amy Winehouse’s fame and the increasing chaos of her life.
Marisa Abela is prettier than jolie-laide Amy Winehouse and cuts a less formidable figure, though she summons plenty of angry energy for Amy’s repeated displays of don’t-give-a-shit self-assertion. But Abela is easily vulnerable too. That serves to remind you how young Winehouse was – nineteen when first signed to Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment in 2002, only twenty-seven when she died of alcohol poisoning. Abela does her own singing throughout and makes a fine job of it. It’s not hard to imagine that people in the record industry were knocked out when they first heard Amy Winehouse. Marisa Abela’s voice doesn’t have that kind of impact. Her singing seems very good rather than astonishing yet its quality plus the accuracy of her vocal imitation adds up to something special. The film refers repeatedly – it’s almost a motif – to the strength of Amy’s desire to be a mother, a yearning that Abela conveys well. This Amy is human rather than iconic.
The prodigiously talented Amy Winehouse seems to have been dominated emotionally by two otherwise unremarkable men, her father Mitch and Blake Fielder-Civil – the ‘he’ in the lyrics of ‘Back to Black’, to whom she was briefly married. (The pair’s domination emerged as a major theme of the Kapadia documentary.) Sam Taylor-Johnson has told Empire magazine that in developing Back to Black she met with the Winehouse family ‘out of respect’ but made clear to them that ‘I had to be able to tell the story the way I wanted’. Mitch Winehouse must nevertheless be delighted by Taylor-Johnson’s version of him: Eddie Marsan plays London black cab-driver Mitch very well but the character is simply conceived, as a caring, concerned parent. The film’s kind treatment of Blake is a more interesting matter, which brings into focus an issue inherent in dramatising a doomed love story such as this. Amy was crazy for Blake. Taylor-Johnson and Matt Greenhalgh have understood that, whatever Blake may actually have been like, they must show us what Amy saw in him. If they don’t, the audience is liable to find Amy’s obsession with Blake merely pitiable; if he’s portrayed as a charmless rotter who did nothing more than introduce her to heroin, the scenes between them are liable to be inert.
They are certainly not that. Amy first meets Blake when she’s drinking alone in a pub; he comes in and starts chatting. Perhaps it really was love at first sight; even if not, this is certainly screen chemistry from the word go. As Blake, Jack O’Connell has humour and charm to burn. When Amy asks what his job is, Blake says he’s a video production assistant. ‘So you make the tea’, she jokes back; he admits it’s true but ‘I make the best tea’. Blake can’t believe Amy’s never heard of the Shangri-Las; O’Connell is brilliantly funny when he puts ‘Leader of the Pack’ on the jukebox and mimes to the ‘Is she really going out with him?’ prologue, and Marisa Abela reacts splendidly. By the time his girlfriend (Therica Wilson-Read) arrives at the pub to claim him, you believe Amy is under Blake’s spell and you understand why. His last words to her on this occasion are ‘Stay lucky, Amy’. As biopic what-an-irony lines go, this is a pretty good one. (The whole scene is very well written.) This dazzling encounter, as well as a treat in itself, supplies a sound basis for much of what follows in the film’s account of the couple’s romance.
O’Connell’s portrait is coherent. He doesn’t suggest that Blake’s irresistible opening patter is a heartless pretence – rather, that he just hasn’t the strength of character to cope with Amy, lavishly gifted and famous and needy as she is. Nearly each time Blake appears, he seems to have shrunk further from the man she met in the pub. The last scene between them takes place in a prison visiting room. Blake is nearing the end of his sentence for GBH (he assaulted a pub landlord and broke his jaw); Amy, as usual, is thrilled to see him. He tells that her he’s had a ‘moment of clarity’, that his counsellor has explained that he and Amy are ‘toxic co-dependents’, that he wants a divorce. Jack O’Connell is still funny here but Blake is ridiculous now. Yet his mega-star wife, who’s too much for him to handle, is floored by his remarks – and poignantly floored, thanks to Marisa Abela’s playing.
While Abela is now exactly the age that Amy Winehouse lived to be, some of the other ages in Back to Black don’t seem quite right. Jack O’Connell is thirty-three; Blake Fielder-Civil was in his mid-twenties at the time. It’s hard to believe that Lesley Manville, as Amy’s beloved grandmother Cynthia, and Eddie Marsan are playing mother and son even allowing that Cynthia’s a conspicuously glamorous granny. Although Manville is actually twelve years his senior, Marsan has been to look older by the decision to give him Mitch Winehouse’s white hair. The performances of all three actors are so good that this doesn’t matter too much, though it’s hard not to keep noticing. Lesley Manville does a great job of animating Cynthia’s love of jazz and pop of the 1950s and 1960s, which strongly influenced her granddaughter’s musical passions. The soundtrack of Back to Black includes Amy’s singing one or two standards (like ‘Body and Soul’) as well as her own greatest hits – in public performance or, for the first of these, in private. When she’s still living at home with her mother (Juliet Cowan), she strums on a guitar in her bedroom and composes ‘What Is It About Men’. After a realistic, tentative start, the melody and lyrics soon flow in a way that you accept as movie-musical convention.
There’s really no accounting for critical taste when it comes to pop and rock star biopics. Back to Black, not yet released in North America, has been panned by much of the British press. To date, it has a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes – compared with, for example, 60% for Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), 88% for Rocketman (2019) and 77% for Elvis (2022). I had low expectations of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film. I didn’t think much of her Nowhere Boy (2009); I wasn’t interested in seeing her Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) or A Million Little Pieces (2018), both of which were widely derided. Back to Black is ill served, too, by its trailer, which I’d seen several times – a compilation of clichéd images and lines that turns out to misrepresent much of Taylor-Johnson’s direction and Matt Greenhalgh’s dialogue. With such an unhappy story, the film can hardly be as entertaining as Rocketman although the quality of the performances is comparable. But Back to Black is better in almost every way than Bohemian Rhapsody. As for Elvis …!
One cliché that doesn’t feature in the trailer but which makes an immediate appearance in the narrative is a caged bird – Cynthia Winehouse’s canary, which Amy inherits on her grandmother’s death. In the event, Taylor-Johnson manages a minor variation on the cliché: once the canary moves in with Amy, it’s uncaged though the bird’s every appearance in more spacious indoor surroundings is a reminder that its new owner is trapped-in-a-cage-of-her-own-making. At least the bird doesn’t fly free once the protagonist departs this life. Sam Taylor-Johnson no doubt sanitises Amy Winehouse’s last years and renders her less extraordinary but this humanising approach doesn’t strike me as shamefully reductive or exploitative, as some detractors have complained. Back to Black’s approach to its tragic heroine is sympathetic. Even in giving the main men in her life a too easy ride, the film-makers can claim this is what Amy, for reasons best known to her, would have wanted.
17 April 2024
