Toxic co-dependence: Marisa Abela and Jack O'Connell as Amy Winehouse and Blake-Fielder-Civil in Back to Black. Photo / supplied
Toxic co-dependence: Marisa Abela and Jack O'Connell as Amy Winehouse and Blake-Fielder-Civil in Back to Black. Photo / supplied
Back to Black is an engrossing and deeply affecting biopic of the late singer Amy Winehouse. She died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, aged just 27, having become tabloid fodder due to addiction issues and a destructive on-off romance. But the forgiving film is a reminder of her glorious musicianship– the jazz-raised Londoner with the distinctively old-school voice sold 20 million or so albums and won six Grammys in her seven-year career – as well as her personal travails.
The film has been labelled “controversial” in some quarters because the accepted villains in the Winehouse story – Amy’s bullish father Mitch (who notoriously kept her out of rehab) and wide-boy, drug-using ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil – aren’t demonised, as they were in Asif Kapadia’s excellent 2015 documentary Amy.
Instead, the men in Winehouse’s life are portrayed by fine actors (Eddie Marsan as Mitch Winehouse and Jack O’Connell as Fielder-Civil). They emerge as nuanced, real people whom Winehouse loved very much.
Ironically, refraining from caricature renders Back to Black a fairer and more honouring tribute to the wild-at-heart singer who strived to control her own life. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson beautifully depicts Winehouse and Fielder-Civil’s meet-cute over a pool game in a Camden pub, as well as the ensuing ups and downs of a relationship that is later defined by Fielder-Civil’s prison counsellor as “toxic co-dependence”.
This strong-willed, irrepressible Winehouse is portrayed superbly by Marisa Abela in what is likely to be a career-catapulting performance. Abela astounds with her incredible singing, self-assured acting and a touching authenticity to her portrayal of a young woman who’s quite simply deeply, desperately in love.
It’s also the fourth and best feature from British artist and film-maker Taylor-Johnson, whose previous films have made perfect stepping stones. Her 2009 debut was Nowhere Boy, about a young John Lennon. She directed two charismatic young actors in the torrid romance Fifty Shades of Grey, and tackled drug addiction in 2018′s A Million Little Pieces.
In dramatising Winehouse’s final years with a focus on the heartbreak that inspired her bestselling final studio album Back to Black, Taylor-Johnson has created an impressive musical and a down-to-earth, honest and relatable love story.
