On The Uninspiring Amy Winehouse Film

The one thing I hadn’t expected to feel while watching the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, was…bored.

Yet there I was, one of five people in the theater on opening day, repeatedly checking the time and wondering “How much more of this tedium is there?”

Not a good sign.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson has said she wanted her film to give Winehouse “her agency back.” It’s ironic, then, that Back to Black shows Amy as a troubled, damaged woman who apparently never had any agency in her life. Even as an ostensibly happy teen, she’s shown dealing with the alcohol, drug abuse and eating disorders that would be exacerbated by the onslaught of her fame, and ultimately led to her death at the age of 27. Later, when she’s signed to a record label, we see her storming out of a meeting with label execs because they suggest she stop playing guitar on stage and just be a singer. Amy is outraged; no one’s going to tell her what to do! Yet the next time she’s seen performing live, she’s without her guitar, having agreed to be just a singer after all. So much for her “agency.”

Perhaps Amy’s frustration over such lack of control over her career also contributed to her addictions. But Back to Black tiptoes around the subject of Amy’s demons, as if embarrassed to have to confront them. There are also some curious revisions; she’s shown starting to use hard drugs on her own, for example, when her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, has been quite open about his having introduced Amy to crack cocaine and heroin. But the rough edges in this story have been smoothed away. While the real Blake always seemed to have a veneer of sleaze coating him, his film doppelganger is clean cut and healthier looking. And, in a laughably improbable scene, a momentarily sober Blake even tells Amy they need to divorce because their relationship, based around drugs, “isn’t healthy.” In reality, Blake divorced Amy while he was in prison, after reading news stories that she was seeing other men.

VIDEO: Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse “Body & Soul”

Oh, and this is also supposed to be a film about a musician and songwriter; the music that inspired her, and the music she created. Yet too often, especially when dealing with Amy’s own music, the tunes feel sidelined. We’re introduced to Amy’s love of the Great American Songbook early on, when she breaks into Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” at a family party. She’s a big fan of jazz, so numbers like Billie Holiday’s “All of Me,” Dinah Washington’s “Mad About the Boy,” Sarah Vaughan’s “Embraceable You” and Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” all pop up in the soundtrack. Some song references are obscure, if you only have slight knowledge about her background. Tony Bennett’s “Body & Soul” plays during one scene, a nice touch if you know that Amy’s last recording session was cutting this very song in a new duet with Bennett, one of her favorite singers. But the film doesn’t make that connection, so for most viewers it’ll just come across as a pleasant number playing in the background.

And then there’s the creation of the Back to Black album itself. It’s regarded as one of the most important albums of the 21st century thus far. Yet the film chooses to not examine this triumph, limiting itself to a brief shot of Amy recording the title track’s vocal in the studio, the rest of the song played over a montage of scenes featuring, in part, a despondent Amy walking the city streets, and, in a nod to the cause of some of her unhappiness, shots of her grandmother’s funeral. 

There was a much more dramatic arc the filmmakers could’ve chosen to explore. The album’s songs came together in stages, the first three (including “You Know I’m No Good,” a highly evocative pen-portrait of the early days of Amy and Blake’s relationship) written following the couple’s first break up, when Amy’s father Mitch had spirited her away to Spain to cheer her up. Amy continued writing songs throughout her on again/off again courtship with Blake; even when seeing other people, they eagerly cheated on their respective partners to be with each other. It’s a tale of obsession that fueled some of the most spellbinding songs about love and heartbreak. Yet the film gives you no sense of why Amy felt driven to write these songs.

The filmmakers also fail to make the connection of how her love of ’60s girl groups directly influenced the sound of her landmark album. It was co-producer Mark Ronson who, on grasping Amy’s musical aesthetic, set her up with Brooklyn’s Dap-Kings, the soul band whose music had a retro feel but was still firmly grounded in the present. Ronson also helped inspire her most famous song, another interesting story that could’ve been dramatized. The two were taking a session break, walking around New York City, when Amy began to recount how she refused to go to rehab, despite her managers’ insistence that she do so.

“It was so funny, the way she said it,” Ronson later recalled. “I was, like, that could really be a song,  you know.” Amy had never considered writing about addiction; now, with Ronson’s encouragement, she came up with “Rehab.”

VIDEO: Amy Winehouse “Rehab”

As the minutes ticked by, I’d wondered if “Rehab” was even going to make an appearance in the film. It finally arrives about 15 minutes before the end, when Amy is seen performing it on the night of the Grammy Awards. It’s presented as a moment of triumph — Amy won five Grammys that evening — when the reality was somewhat different. She’d just come out of yet another stint in rehab. She couldn’t be at the Grammy ceremony in person because a drug conviction meant she couldn’t get a visa to visit the United States. And when her friend Juliette Ashby congratulated Amy on her Grammy wins, she was dismayed by her childhood pal’s response: “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”

None of this informs the film. Instead, her end is fictionalized; a lonely Amy is seen wandering around her sparse, chilly home, distraught over the news that Blake is to become a father. In fact, things were more complicated in those final days; Amy had a new boyfriend she was planning to marry, and she still maintained sporadic contact with Blake. And though the film claims her death by alcohol poisoning came after an “extended period” of sobriety, she’d really only stopped drinking for two weeks. The last time her doctor saw her, she asked why Amy had started drinking again; Amy replied that she was “bored.” Asked if she planned to stop, Amy said she didn’t know. In less than 24 hours she would be dead.

The performances, headed up by Marisa Abela as Amy and Jack O’Connell as Blake, are fine (Abela does creditable singing, though she lacks the edgy timbre of Winehouse’s voice). But the actors can’t do much with a limp script that dumbs down the story to its most simplistic level. Back to Black is a film with little insight into its subject, and less entertainment value. You’ll gain a greater understanding of Amy Winehouse by reading the “Amy” sections of Howard Sounes’ 27: A History of the 27 Club, while listening to Back to Black: Songs from the Original Motion Picture, which features a mix of Amy’s songs, the music she adored, and “Song for Amy,” a broody number by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, who also wrote the film’s score. After that, watch Asif Kapadia’s extraordinary 2015 documentary Amy, which has all the passion and pathos that Back to Black so sorely lacks.

VIDEO: Back to Black film trailer

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Gillian G. Gaar

Seattle-based writer Gillian G. Gaar covers the arts,
entertainment and travel.

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