Back to Black

dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson

2024

I think biopics for musicians are some of the laziest flicks that ever get made, and they either end up becoming hits that are adored by audiences that garner their stars lots of shiny awards, or, like this one, almost universally derided travesties liked by no-one.

Because I decided that this was musician biopic week, I watched this and One Love over the course of two nights, one being about Amy Winehouse (obviously, I mean, that’s this one), and one about Bob Marley. Both came out around the same time, both were hated by critics, both made their money back, so at least on paper they weren’t failures.

And yet the critical consensus is that they were both pretty shit.

I don’t pretend my opinion means anything, or that it matters, compared to anyone else’s, if only measured against my other opinions. So when I say that I thought Back to Black was a much better film than One Love, I don’t pretend that it’s going to change anyone’s mind, or that it should. I just really felt that this flick captured a lot more of what made Amy who she was, even in a sensationalistic and somewhat superficial vehicle, than the other flick ever came close to.

And I say this unequivocally – both films probably have solid performances by two solid actors, but neither come close to even looking like the stars they are about. Marisa Abela doesn’t look like Amy, but then I don’t know that she has to for it to work. For me it felt like she embodied Amy in such a way that it gave us more of a sense of her energy beyond what she might have looked like (or sounded like, exactly).

I don’t come to this from the perspective of a fan, because I never bought one of her records, back when that was a thing. I knew of her when she was alive, and knew some of her bigger hits, but never cared that much when she was being savaged in the media for her perceived faults as a singer or a human being, and when she died I noted that she’d died at that terrible age of 27, like many a rock star of yesteryear.

It was only after I matured a bit (I hope) as a person, and after I watched the excellent documentary Amy by Asif Kapadia, and also another one as an episode of the series A Life in Ten Pictures that I came to appreciate what a talent she was, what a joyful person she was at times, what a terrible shame it was that she was so devastated by addiction, and that certain people in her life were absolutely irredeemable pieces of shit.

I remember watching a video of her when she was trying to perform a show in Belgrade a little while before her death, being laughed at and booed by the crowd for being too soon out of rehab, and too drunk to stand properly, and thinking “well, that’s what you get”.

And then she died a few months later, and so many of us were so callous about it, equating the tabloid image of her with the real person, and caring about neither of them, as the papers that hounded her to death then shifted to their maudlin “oh what a shame it was, we definitely played no part in her demise.”

It shames me, a little bit, to remember that reaction, back then.

As this film clearly gets across, she was a fuck up, like so many of us, but goddamn was she a talented one who sang her heart out when she could, and who was let down by some of the people in her life. Some of us were luckier than her, others not so much.

One of the scenes I’ve seen before from interview footage that is played again here in the background, on a tv during the film, which still infuriates me to this day is an early interview with Jonathan Ross where he says she sounds so “common”, but then soft soaps it by saying it’s okay for him to say it, because he’s common too.

I mean, is the fucker having a laugh? Equating himself, on his own fucking tv program, when he’d already been in tv for over 20 years, from a family of actors, possessor of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, that he, like her, was still “common”, despite being as rich as King Midas?

All he’s really saying is, is “Oi, who let you poor scum into the studio?”

And of course, this being 2004, the only way Amy had to sidestep this kind of sexist, misogynist, prole-shaming crap from the ‘best’ the British Empire could offer, was to sing. Sing like her life depended on it, to make people go “ah, of course, that’s why they let the poor girl in”.

It would be a couple years later before she was known around the world, but it’s a start, a place to rise up from. She has the key loves of her life, and we find out about them, like the grandma, the soul music / big band era stuff her nan and dad love (the great Eddie Marsan, playing a terrible man, being Mitch Winehouse, and the even greater Lesley Manville, as soon to be dearly departed nan).

And of course Blake (Jack O’Connell). Whatever mixed feelings I might have about Mitch, or how easily he’s let off in terms of how horribly he exploited Amy, and how little he thought about her well-being as opposed to get her back on the road again (before her untimely end), I find that I’m not really capable of rationality or equanimity when it comes to Blake, or even portrayals of Blake.

Their meet cute at a pub when Blake’s just won some money on a horse race, and Amy’s had a modest amount of success, maybe is a great intro into their attraction to each other, their romance for the ages. But I find my loathing, my abject, visceral loathing of the man in any form makes it hard to even watch someone playing him on screen.

Oh, I know what a mercurial and terrible thing love can be, I know that so much of it feels like it’s outside of our hands, and we’re at the mercy of cosmic currents and forces beyond us. But too many people, too many women, especially, you feel like, if only she’d met someone different, someone slightly less selfish that day, someone not as appalling as him, maybe the course of her life may have been different.

As superficial as many may argue that the treatment of what he was actually like might seem onscreen, I think it’s pretty fucking clear that the progression from just smoking dope to using hard drugs regularly at his instigation is pretty damning. Maybe it simplifies Amy’s responsibility in her own downfall, as if words like that matter anymore when someone is dead, their light extinguished forever. I mean, after all, you could argue that it’s not like Blake forced her to get addicted to hard drugs only to guarantee that he’d never be short of the stuff. It’s a thing people could believe, or at least say without thinking too much.

I mean, the other more callous, somehow, argument you could make, if you’re a shitty person with a broken tricycle where your heart should be, is that without the all consuming abandonment / love, and subsequent heartbreak, you don’t get albums like Back to Black, or that song, or that voice, with all that pain in it.

However much this flick might seem like a potted history of the highlights and many lowlights of her life, if you’re not a person devoid of humanity, you would sacrifice whatever masterpiece came out of such pain in order to have the person still be around. Surely the people closest to Amy who actually cared about her wouldn’t trade her life for continued fame or notoriety, in order to still have her around?

To argue otherwise is to see these performers as little more than expendable, like blood based juice boxes, to be drained, squeezed down to their last drops, and then casually thrown away.

The version of Amy I see here is one who loved life, who lived and loved as hard as she could, who put her entire being into her singing, and who persisted in the face of the shitty naysayers who mocked her ‘lowly’ status or lack of polish, and who alternated between praising her and condemning her once she achieved global success.

And it’s sad, and it should be sad. I wish things had gone differently for her. As this film makes clear, she deserved better, from all of us, not just some of the worst people in her life. And even if she was a fuck up, she was a talented fuck up, and that’s way more than the rest of us (fuck ups) can say.

I think Marisa Abela’s larger than life performance deserved way more acclaim than what it got, and I wonder what great stuff she could get to do next. But it’s not that unusual that, playing someone so singular who was also unfairly maligned and not appropriately appreciated in her time, that she might get the same treatment from the press.

8 times no film and nothing will ever make me like or care about the likes of Mark Ronson either out of 10

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“ No. Not for me. Class A drugs are for mugs.” – especially if you’re the one paying for them - Back to Black