It’s been nearly a decade since Asif Kapadia’s Amy hit theaters and caused the collective culture to stop and ponder exactly what they’d said about Amy Winehouse over the course of her short career. If not the first crack in the dam, it did cause its collapse and flooded our collective memories with rivers of uncomfortable guilt. Almost overnight, every person who, at some point over the course of the late-aughts, had uttered some kind of mean-spirited gag about Winehouse’s appearance, presence, or personal struggles was transformed into an eternal fan, even those in the media who made the act of simply leaving a pharmacy into a prolonged and painful assault. Ultimately, only so much blame can be placed on the paparazzi, as much as any other factor, for her untimely passing: As anybody who has either experienced alcoholism themselves or watched a loved one suffer or succumb to it, there are plenty of reasons, genetic and otherwise, as to why people drink. Even if you like booze and consume it in moderation, it’s hard not to see why temperance movements once existed, as wrong-headed as they might have been, or to acknowledge the public health burden it places on everyone, even the risk is often acceptable.
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black really wants you to know that Amy Winehouse had a drinking problem. It introduces us to young Amy (Marisa Abela) at a family party, as she nurses a glass of wine while her Nana (Lesley Manville) slices a chocolate cake and reminisces about the good old days on the stage, singing (and perhaps sleeping) with the likes of Tony Bennett. Perhaps a reference to a rakish husband or scummy journalists could have been included, but the point stands: the ominous foreshadowing of her end is laid on thick and heavy, to the point it’s a wonder that a fat guy with a gun didn’t jump out at John Lennon every thirty seconds in her last film about an artist and their origins, Nowhere Boy. Yet Taylor-Johnson and her frequent collaborator Matt Greenhalgh (who wrote Control for Anton Corbijn and subsequently got replaced a pod person, I guess) avoid that focused approach, instead opting for the whole-life survey – minus the end. You read that right: Winehouse’s collapse is depicted in three end-title postscripts, an eminently empathetic choice that falters when placed in this storytelling framework. Who wants to be remembered at their worst, especially when they’d given so much to culture?
It’s important to remember Winehouse’s presence in her cultural context, as she was the long-awaited breakthrough of British neo-soul to the worldwide mainstream following the slow and steady decline of the UK’s other cultural exports after they boomed in the ‘90s. The Spice Girls were done, Britpop gave way to the British “indies” like The Libertines, Coldplay was trading blows with U2 for that arena-rock crowd, and Harry Styles was in shorter pants than he is now. The climate had changed, the world had grown wearier, and the nostalgia-tinted faux-Spector production harkened to a bit of glamor lost to modernity, the same impulse that Italian poets like Petrarch felt when contemplating the glory of Rome hundreds of years after the Empire’s collapse.
This world, which she emerged into, had exacting standards for its artists – she was never going to be Britney or Christina, with the backup dancers and club bangers, but she was expected to look like them in certain ways while remaining exotic enough to be “different” – and her self-assurance in some manners, like when she fights with executives at Island Records about the nature of her stage presence is undercut by those toll of those expectations. She’s self-assured, at least in Abela’s rendering, but there’s a vacancy to her performance that keeps us at an arm’s length. She’s never playing a fully realized character: from the moment she appears on screen, she’s playing Amy Winehouse, and we’re never able to get close enough to her to feel things with her. We just watch them unfold from a distance, much like we did in real life.
On the other hand, the film can’t exactly showcase why she was so special, even as Taylor-Johnson does her best to do so. Winehouse was not the first nor the last of her ilk (though many, like Adele, would fill the void she left), but she had something similar to artists like Joss Stone or Duffy didn’t, at least to American audiences – she had edge. Her rosy recreations of the past included all of the dirt sheet gossip that was formerly massaged out of a star’s public presence back in the days when you could control their public perception from the top down. Winehouse leaned into a kind of autofiction relatable to a mass audience – flippant, funny, withering, and, yes, soulful. One could believe she meant every word she sang, having been through it just like they had. Her sound was familiar yet achingly contemporary, suggesting that the good times hadn’t been so good all along while relishing in their aesthetic splendor. It’s also funny to consider that her heyday, which she bemoans as classless and unrefined in the film, is now the “good old days” for a generation of battered millennials, of which she was a symbol of forthright self-assurance, who just did not give a fuck about what was expected of her from the powers-that-be. She, truly, was not like the other girls, and never wanted to be.
This self-advocacy and commitment to honesty is haltingly observed throughout Back to Black, which depicts Winehouse shouting about how she has to live her life to let the songs flow through her pen or shouting down a potential manager about how she’s “not a fucking Spice Girl.” Yet the connections aren’t exactly displayed – we get little sense of how her process came about, much less any sterling hit-making that you see in something like Ray or other biopics about musicians. Music was just something she did, it seems, with the recording of her two records – including Back to Black – being yadda-yadda’d so that our focus remains primarily on the more lurid aspects of her life, such as her marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), which is, I guess, Taylor-Johnson realizing that she potentially had gold in her hands with O’Connell’s casting. He’s a blistering vision of Camden Town charisma rendered in its Byronic Angry-Young-Man attraction, the closest thing she has to an Albert Finney, and their relationship is really the film’s focus. From the moment O’Connell appears on screen, he’s captivating (and hot) – introducing Amy to the Shangri-Las over a game of billiards, lip-syncing to the conversation that opens “Leader of the Pack,” with steadily accumulating hints of the disaster that would follow making their way through their casual flirtation until it’s revealed that, at the end of their conversation, that Blake already has a girlfriend.
There is a punchier tragedy that one could wring from their brief relationship, one that would make the film more complex yet also get it further away from the project’s goals, and it’s one that Taylor-Johnson might have been better suited for. They have a toxic love, merged at the intersections of fame, exploitation, addiction, and, worse of all, potential – one can see a world in which these two people actually were able to improve one another rather than destroy, perhaps in another life where there weren’t a bunch of over-glorified punters with cameras harassing them or enough easy money coming their way to buy booze and drugs. But their relationship’s dissolution is sad, though the suggestions along the way as to why it fell apart, beyond the more obvious explanations (Blake coming to Jesus about addiction and codependency during a bid, Amy’s career, etc.), are extrapolated to lengths that are patronizing and painful. We see Amy yearn to have children, even expressing how much she wishes a young fan was her own while signing an autograph at the package store checkout, crying over negative pregnancy tests, and the film’s ending is directly informed by it – but surely there was much more to everything than just that. Or perhaps it’s simpler: these people brought out the worst in one another. When Blake tells her as much while she visits him in prison, it’s styled as a flippant insult among others as he casually disposes of her rather than perhaps a truth buried among a weed of insulting ego defenses.
This is the strange bind that Back to Black finds itself in: It can’t just celebrate Winehouse’s talent or presence or give her the narrative space to show us how she improves her craft, and yet it can’t be mostly about her relationship, given that it’s intended to uplift the audience rather than depress them. Winehouse’s family, who weren’t pleased with Amy’s portrayal of them or their daughter’s struggles, authorized and approved of this film, which isn’t nearly as compromising as it seems – plenty of good art has been made under those conditions, after all – but the overwhelming love they feel for their daughter stands in the way of telling her story as an artist. They knew she was special, know that we now agree, and assume that the self-evident nature of her talent means that they can skip over most of that “music” stuff, no matter how hard she worked or how joyful her successes were.
There are few highs, just a series of anhedonia-laden plateaus that give way to precipitous stumbles. As such, we never feel the depth of her pain nor the abyssal void that she left in the lives of those around her and culture writ large once she succumbed to her demons. It’s just too neat and tidy, too unwilling to engage in the beautiful and ugly aspects of her existence, to ever make that emotional connection. “Neat” and “tidy” were things that Winehouse herself never was in her art or her life, and it’s absurd for a film about someone as blisteringly iconoclastic – and inimitable – as Amy Winehouse was to flatten her story into something this easy while perpetually nodding at the tragedy at the end and ignoring the glories along the way.