Amy Winehouse lived a vibrant life, and from the moment of her death in 2011, her biography has been colourful. It is an indictment of the times we live in. Nothing to be proud of. Back to the Dark Ages is the first dramatic film of its kind. It continues and hides in the shadow of Asif Kapadia’s excellent 2015 documentary Amy. Whereas that film went deep and broke her family’s hearts, this film is just paddling in shallow waters. It’s a shallow and disappointing jukebox biopic that’s currently in vogue. But it’s worse than that. Back to the Dark Ages doesn’t have the self-awareness to realise that it’s just as bad as the paparazzi of its day.
A lot of people may find this film to be passable. The film has a great soundtrack, thanks to Winehouse himself, which gives Sam Taylor-Johnson plenty of opportunities for montages. The director of Fifty Shades of Grey shoots smoothly and with a unique style, this film could easily be a success. As for the female lead, Marisa Abella seems to be a perfect fit. Her voice impersonation is also excellent and the songs and script are done perfectly. The raw, simplistic script by Matt Greenhalgh of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool does Abella no favours, but her effort and respect for Winehouse is obvious. There’s more to capturing Amy’s glamour than wearing a beehive and a fake ‘daddy’s girl’ tattoo.
When the film opens, Amy still has nothing. Before her debut album, Frank, was completed in 2003, Back to Black joined her story. The album was born out of an anachronistic era of jazz in the age of manufactured pop. Amy is no fucking Spice Girl, and she’s not doing it for anyone. She’s a family girl through and through, very close to her grandmother Cynthia, played by Leslie Manville, and her parents’ respective pallets. We learn that her mother Janice (Juliet Cowan) is unwell, but the film doesn’t go any further on this.
Mitch Winehouse gets more attention, played by the sympathetic Eddie Marsan. The real Mitch hated the Kapadia documentary – which dared to criticise him for being responsible for Amy’s fall from grace – but he would have found Back to Black more palatable. Here, he’s a doting, amiable character. Completely beyond reproach. True, he’s the one who refuses, refuses, refuses to get clean, but he’s the father who sends Amy to rehab when she really needs it. No mention of the exploitation documentary he made for Channel 4 two years before she died.
Jack O’Connell is equally belittled as Blake Field-Sewell, whose significant other is in a toxic, on-again, off-again relationship built on a long history of infatuation and frequent alcoholism. Their relationship triggers some of the film’s best scenes – a sleepy, dangerously seductive bar encounter – a lovely encounter – and a disturbing sense of appropriation. Taylor-Johnson acknowledges Blake’s role in Amy’s introduction to Class A drugs, but she does her best to separate Blake from Amy’s first attempt. In its place, Blake plays a huge role in the formation of Amy’s iconic image and voice. Granted, the Back to Black album was born out of their first breakup, and perhaps he did introduce Amy to the Shangri-La Hotel, but that doesn’t make him Amy’s celebrity ancestor. Their love story is angular, but Taylor-Johnson’s scrutiny is far from profound.
The lack of an in-depth analysis of the reality of Amy’s story proved to be a common problem with Black-on-Black. Certainly, Taylor-Johnson’s failure to enrage Amy in the first act leads to a mere reconstruction in the second act and exploitation in the third. Who would have benefited from a close-up shot of Amy in tears? In 2011, dads would have died for this shot. Amy’s bulimia leads to Amy’s bulimia, and Amy’s bulimia appears in so few scenes in the film that the film barely hints that she might be suffering from depression. Instead, Amy is portrayed as a lifelong teenager: foul-mouthed, willful, naive, and hormonal. Take away the nuances of her story, and the rest is the tale of a young woman meticulously planning her own death. Such an angle doesn’t even scratch the surface.
