The final time Sam Taylor-Johnson directed a film about medication it used to be A Million Little Items in 2019, in keeping with James Frey’s notoriously inauthentic memoir of dependancy – and the final time she made a movie a couple of track legend it used to be Nowhere Boy in 2009, about John Lennon.
Now she brings the 2 in combination in what’s simply her easiest paintings up to now: an pressing, heat, heartfelt dramatisation, scripted via Matt Greenhalgh, of the lifetime of Amy Winehouse, the bright London soul singer who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 in 2011. It’s a film with the simplicity, even the naivety, of a fan-tribute. However there’s a totally enticing and sweet-natured efficiency from Marisa Abela as Amy – despite the fact that arguably taking the rougher edges off. The one time Abela is not up to persuasive is when she has to get right into a battle at the north London streets of Camden.
And Jack O’Connell is a coolly charismatic and muscular presence as her no-good husband and addiction-enabler Blake Fielder-Civil. O’Connell can’t lend a hand being a sensible, succesful display presence and makes Blake much more sympathetic and no more rodenty than he seemed in actual lifestyles – and but a part of the (cheap) level of the movie is that he used to be a human being, afraid that Amy would go away him for any other superstar, and that media pictures are deceptive.
There’s a wonderful, if faintly sucrose scene through which the already boozed-up Blake first meets Amy in The Excellent Mixer pub in Camden The town (already well-known for its affiliation with 90s cool Britannia and Blur) – humming along with his horse-racing winnings and airily unfazed when the already entranced Amy demanding situations him to a recreation of pool whilst he cheekily shall we her (and us) think he doesn’t know who she is. However after all he does or even one-ups her in musical wisdom in compelling her to confess that she hasn’t ever heard, or heard of the Shangri-Las’ Chief of the Pack, which he places at the jukebox and extravagantly mimes to. There’s a rising disappointment within the realisation that this ecstatic first assembly is the primary and final time they’re going to ever be in reality satisfied in combination.
In all probability any film about Winehouse goes to endure compared to Asif Kapadia’s compelling archive-mosaic documentary Amy from 2015, which delivered the girl herself and likewise gave a clearer concept of her hard musicianship and professionalism, some distance from the tabloid cool animated film of nonstop drugginesss. However this movie tries to intuit the phase that romance performed in Amy Winehouse’s lifestyles and the narrative of sadness that it created in her paintings: a toxic wellspring of inspiration.
And Taylor-Johnson’s movie may be a lot more sympathetic to Winehouse’s father Mitch, the cab motive force estranged from Amy’s mom who got here again into her lifestyles to lend a hand arrange her occupation and famously counselled in opposition to her going to rehab.
Mitch comes throughout higher right here as a result of he’s performed with bullish attraction and schmaltz via Eddie Marsan – very humorous within the scene the place he infuriates Amy via coming to the most important assembly and siding with the report industry pros in opposition to her. I in reality wonder whether an similarly nice movie known as Mitch might be made merely about that lonely, complicated determine.
Again to Black is largely a gradual, forgiving movie and there are different, harder, bleaker tactics to place Winehouse’s lifestyles on display – however Abela conveys her tenderness, and most likely maximum poignantly of all her adolescence, so tellingly at odds with that arduous symbol and eerily mature voice.