Sam Taylor-Johnson's jazz-meets-rock-star biopic exerts an authentic fascination, but its dysfunctional-addict love story keeps us at a distance.
‘Back to Black’ Review: Marisa Abela Nails Amy Winehouse in Every Look, Mood and Note in a Biopic at Once Forthright and Forbidding
‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy’ Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reignbiopic takes its title from, is a record built on an exquisite contradiction. The music has a crispy delicious retro-bop bounce, a quality that extends to Winehouse’s vocals, which take the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and kick them up into something playfully ferocious.
The film opens in 2002, when she’s already an up-and-coming sensation in the London nightclub scene. At a get-together of relatives in the home of her doting father, Mitch — her parents are separated, and Amy still lives in a small bedroom in the home of her troubled mother — Amy and Mitch team up for a living-room duet on “Fly Me to the Moon,” and we see the unironic virtuosity that’s her ground floor as a singer.
But here’s where the movie starts to beckon us onto a rather forbidding track. These two are smitten, fused by an addictive narcissism that doesn’t just run to sloshed flirting in the pub. Blake is into cocaine . When he leaves a gig of Amy’s in the middle of a song, all because he’d rather do drugs than listen to her, she comes out into the street and ends up assaulting him. These two have an aggressive chemistry, but they’re breaking up before they’re getting started.
What about the songs we love from “Black to Black”? Abela’s in-concert renditions of several Winehouse classics have a dilapidated splendor, and her performance of “Rehab” at the 2008 Grammy Awards is perfection. The actor did all her own singing; she gets every soaring and scat-souled nuance. The songs are all in there, but not in a way that feels, at each moment, like they’re expressing something so emotionally necessary that it becomes cathartic.
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