Any success enjoyed by the Amy Winehouse biopic, BACK TO BLACK, rests squarely on the frail shoulders of the actress playing the singer, Marisa Abela. With an outsized presence like Winehouse herself, Abela channels Winehouse’s violence and vulnerability, making her at once a lost little girl and a musical powerhouse who refused to be pigeonholed or standardized by the industry. While the script streamlines Winehouse’s early years into a cliché of the paint-by-numbers Behind the Music documentary genre, Abela fills in the gaps, of which there are many, with Winehouse’s twisted charisma, legion of emotional shadings, and a convincing simulacrum of Winehouse’s distinct vocal style. The yowl that expressed passion, despair, anger, and ecstasy, biting off the lyrics as they escape her lips. She also, and this isn’t insignificant, wears the mile-high beehives with the same insouciant assurance that Winehouse had.
Abela is in virtually every frame of film, with the characters around her pared down to her beloved grandmother and style icon, Cynthia (Lesley Manville), her father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan), the frustrated jazz musician who ran his daughter’s life, and Blake (Jack O’Connell) her husband, the blustering boy-toy who swept her off her feet by miming “The Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las in a pub, and later got her hooked on hard drugs. The approach makes for a circumscribed world in which Amy moves at lightning speed from playing tiny gigs to signing her first record deal at 18. It moves so quickly that egregious expository dialogue is necessary to establish just how much time has passed since the last bit of egregious expository dialogue. It also leads to a certain redundancy, with Amy impatiently declaring that she doesn’t care about the money, only about being true to herself. Which she is. Abela storms magnificently through the lives of those on the periphery of the film, including agents, musicians, and roommates who barely get named in their jarringly abbreviated screen time. She is also effective displaying Amy’s addictive personality, guzzling vodka from a bottle, obsessing over having children, and obsessing to the point of mania over Blake, played as a vacuous preener by O’Connell, but a very pretty one.
The film paints Blake as trouble from their first meeting after Amy has told off her record company and stopped in a pub for her favorite drink, the Rickstasy (three parts vodka, one part Southern Comfort, one part banana liqueur and one part Baileys). He swaggers, she’s smitten, with their ensuing game of pool rendered into playful foreplay. Amy’s subsequent disintegration, her anger that she turns outward, sometimes on innocent bystanders, and inward with bulimia as well as her addictions, is paired with her desperate love for Blake that tore her apart even when they were together. In Abela’s hands, it is part puppy-love, part compulsion, all of it self-destructive. That part of Amy’s life makes up the last third of the film, which delivers a cautionary tale of a woman not so much living on the edge as teetering on a precipice. It’s a performance that is mesmerizing and worthy of a script that could honor it.
In an uneven screenplay, there are moments of genuine sweetness to palliate the jumps and starts, none better than Cynthia molding and shaping Amy’s hair into its first beehive. It’s not the lines they are saying, but the tenderness of the older woman fussing with her granddaughter’s hair, and the way Amy responds to that tenderness in a way that shows her aching need for connection and understanding. It’s the shorthand BACK TO BLACK uses throughout to establish characters, but this one lands. The complicated relationship Amy had with her father also gets the shorthand treatment in one scene early on of them scrapping, but while he is a constant presence in her life, as written he has an almost ghostly presence gradually receding from anything more than reacting passively to his daughter’s increasingly disturbing behavior.
BACK TO BLACK is in obvious awe of its subject and of her struggles, but fails to create a film as dynamic, and multi-layered, as edgy or as iconoclastic as Amy herself.
Damn.
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