'Back to Black' is better than you've heard
Focus
The intoxicating pull of Amy Winehouse’s woozy reverence is a contradiction in itself: impressed yet over it, old-fashioned yet profane, timeless yet stream-of-consciousness, a throwback speaking only to how she feels just exactly now. Discarded upon its release as a trainwreck, “Back to Black,” now streaming on Peacock, is in fact something else entirely: a biopic that connects some dots and emerges with both affection for its artist and directness about the tragedy within.
In a role that should but might not make her a star, Marisa Abela plays the infamous British singer, who died in 2011 at 27 but first brought horn-inflected vocal jazz to the masses, reclaimed the beehive from Marge Simpson, and also made a household name out of her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), who captured her heart and demolished it in the direction of the titular breakout album. O’Connell finds BFC both a right wanker and charisma machine, enough so there’s no question about Winehouse’s affection for him or whether anything good can come of all this.
As crafted by experienced music-movie screenwriter Matt Greenlagh (“Control” and “Nowhere Boy,” the latter which was also directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson), “Back to Black” is occasionally its own out-of-body experience, simultaneously too simple and too hazy while not doing enough to understand the creation of Winehouse’s music or the impact of its explosion. Where at times the film expands immensely, its emotions overflowing like Winehouse’s tattoos fearlessly marking her biggest feelings and people, other times it flattens and dulls, the uninhibited spark softened to a radio edit, the groove cut off preemptively.
It would be easy to connect that to Winehouse’s death at a such a young age. But “Back to Black” asks us to merely look at an absurdly talented person who also struggled with addiction as well as a relationship that advanced her creative confessional impulses and her most dangerous extremes. Certainly a fuller understanding exists of the real person, as is the case for nearly every biopic, and the intense focus on Winehouse’s maternal priorities while obscuring the physical impact of her numerous ailments creates a narrative imbalance that feels like theory at best and offensive misdirection at worst.
And yet: That shouldn’t discard the life and art and integrity and toxicity that swirl together here with discussion-worthy recklessness, a lovely song inextricably linked with trouble.
B
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