IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched in the cinema (57th visit in 2024)
Alongside Amy Winehouse's statements about music and her hopes for the future, the most important sentence in "Back to Black" is the wish that people remember her as a person. Just 13 years after her death, Winehouse has certainly not been forgotten by the generations who witnessed her rise to the music Olympus in the 2000s. And back in 2015, British documentary filmmaker Asif Kapadia delivered a successful feature film about the London jazz singer's career.
The biopic by director Sam Taylor-Johnson is roughly structured around the creation and success of the album of the same name, but tells the story chronologically throughout. A few years of Winehouse's career are covered without any specific chronological order, peppered with personal incisions. Lead actress Marisa Abela represents a version of Winehouse that strives for as much authenticity as possible. The British actress sings the songs herself, imitates the North London accent as elaborately as possible and, thanks to excellent make-up, transforms herself into the appropriate Amy when stress, drug use and illness leave their mark.
The imitation and playfulness of the music is the most successful aspect of the film. All the big hits are sung and played on the way from the bar to the festival stage. The fact that "Back to Black" is even played in its entirety is one of the few moments in which the film at least does justice to Winehouse's musical oeuvre. However, there is a dramatic montage in which professional success and private misfortune are combined, which is not very successful in cinematic terms. It's not the first music film by Taylor-Johnson, who has also made music videos for bands, but on a smaller scale it makes use of many genre conventions.
One of these conventions is that there is actually no time for the small moments and fates. Winehouse's family is either very brief or remains astonishingly pale. The portrayal of the father and manager in particular offers nothing but absolution for the living. The movie gives you the feeling that in the end it was probably just bad luck with the sudden death of the 27-year-old and is also surprisingly uninterested in the causes. Money is never an issue here, and envy is only briefly mentioned by her husband Blake. In general, it is an astonishingly obliging portrayal of a drug junkie and convicted violent offender. In the end, Amy is supposed to be happy that anyone is bothering with her at all. Branded with the labels bulimia and alcohol addiction instead of genius and dreamer.
While the movie seems trapped in its own mediocrity, the handling of Winehouse leaves a few questions unanswered. In the end, you are more interested in the train crash than the whole career. The ideal world of the biopic, in which everything is made equal, almost degenerates here into a reversal of perpetrator and victim, when Winehouse even says out loud that she is the worst person in the world.
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