Throughout the 1990s, there was a slightly bonkers British television show on which members of the public would dress up like famous singers and perform songs as them. Stars in Their Eyes — essentially, elevated karaoke for a national audience — was full of talented people, performing in full costume, doing impressive impressions.
Watching Back to Black made me think of Stars in Their Eyes repeatedly.
The new Amy Winehouse biopic is — like that weird TV show — full of excellent impersonations and on-point recreations of iconic outfits and performances. But it never actually looks beneath the surface. Charting the charismatic songwriter’s rise from scrappy working-class London beginnings to international superstardom, the film is rarely anything more than a thinly drawn approximation of her life.
We’ve got Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) aggressively yelling about how much she loves jazz and breaking into song at family gatherings. We’ve got her lover, Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), being a cheeky chappy, betting on horses and drinking pints in the pub. Then of course there’s Amy’s dad, Mitch Winehouse (Eddie Marsan), being a salt-of-the-earth supporter of his daughter who occasionally drops some Cockney rhyming slang into a sentence, lest we forget where he’s from.
The actors do the absolute most with the material at hand — kudos to the entire cast — but a self-conscious script holds them back at every turn. There’s just not enough meat to work with.
Part of the problem is that the Amy and Blake we see here are ripped almost entirely from the tabloids of the mid-to-late-aughts. Opportunities are missed at every turn. For example, the movie focuses repeatedly on how plagued by paparazzi photographers Amy was at home in London. Rather than use this as a chance to talk about the psychological toll that attention took on the vulnerable young woman — or even how famous women of this era were treated by those armies of photographers — paparazzi scenes are instead used to recreate some of the worst exploitation those cameras ever captured.
Also problematic: the version of Mitch we get in Back to Black is the most placid, supportive, big-softy version of Amy’s father possible. The Winehouse estate approved this movie and — despite director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s assertions that the family did not dictate the content of the movie — you can’t help but wonder if its endorsement had an impact. Anyone who has watched Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Amy knows that the father-daughter dynamics in the Winehouse family were complicated and at times very uncomfortable. The version we get in Back to Black sometimes feels like little more than a Mitch Winehouse PR campaign.
The film does offer a few redeeming elements, starting with the relationship between Amy and her beloved grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville). The chemistry between Manville and Abela, while a little forced in their earliest scenes, winds up being the most arresting of the movie, and their pairing ultimately produces the most realistically heart-wrenching moments in Back to Black. If only the filmmakers had leaned further into this relationship, the viewer might actually have learned something new about Amy’s inner life, motivations and anxieties. (Even her lifelong struggle with bulimia is treated as an afterthought here.)
In the end, Back to Black feels like a movie for people who don’t actually care about Amy Winehouse. It frequently comes off like an animated rendition of the public perception of the singer that existed before the release of the Amy documentary.
That documentary gave her a multitude of layers beneath the exaggerated beehive and eyeliner. Back to Black seems to want to take us back to a simpler time, drawing only a brief overview of Amy’s key life events and recorded output, and offering existing fans little more than a bleak little trip down (far too recent) memory lane.
‘Back to Black’ is released nationwide on May 17, 2024.
