Back to Black Makes Amy Winehouse’s Image Go Back to Shit

When Asif Kapadia’s Amy came out in 2015, the director’s monumental achievement of being able to make audiences truly understand Amy Winehouse’s life and art—the context out of which she arose—by only using her words, archival footage/images and interviews from family and friends is what made it stand apart from the standard-issue hokey biopic. As a documentary, it had that “luxury”—just as another documentary, called Little Girl Blue, about fellow “27 Club” member Janis Joplin did. And, incidentally, Little Girl Blue was released the same year as Amy (the two women, to be sure, shared many similar traits beyond just the addiction and self-destructive element). One would think that, after such a cinematic feat, nobody else would be foolish enough to try fucking with Winehouse’s legacy via a biopic. But to have thought that was to 1) sorely underestimate the varied vultures continuing to pick at whatever is left of Amy’s carrion and 2) forget that Mitch Winehouse, the man in charge of Winehouse’s estate, has been gunning for a “proper” film about the chanteuse since he saw Amy almost ten years ago. 

His beef with the documentary, obviously, was that it didn’t portray him “favorably.” Instead, it portrayed him as he—and Blake Fielder-Civil, to boot—so often was: opportunistic. Clearly capitalizing on his daughter’s fame and fortune in a way that wasn’t exactly “fatherly” (though, to be fair, no father will ever be worse on that front than one, Jamie Spears). That Mitch and Janis Winehouse, the key players in the Winehouse estate, could give full approval of something as atrocious and legacy-butchering as Back to Black is telling of just how much the former wanted to improve his own image at all costs (this includes being portrayed by a thinner version of himself, Eddie Marsan). And the cost here is making Winehouse look completely pathetic and unempowered in every way. 

There are many examples of this cruel, depthless rendering throughout the film, but let’s just name the first few that come to mind: Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela, doing the best she can) “flirtatiously” telling Blake Fielder-Civil at the pub where she first met him in 2005, “I’m not a feminist. I like men too much.” This in response to Blake (played here by Jack O’Connell) telling her that “Fuck Me Pumps” isn’t a very feminist song. Winehouse shrugs and says she simply can’t stand women who waste their potential. This line feels more than slightly ironic, of course, considering the audience already knows that she wasted her own. Of the “not being a feminist” comment, she quickly assures she’s just kidding. But what’s already been unspoken up to now has been let out of the box. And it’s clear that director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (best known for writing Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) want to perpetuate the idea that Winehouse was nothing more than a manic ball of codependent need, a “guy’s girl” (second only to being a daddy’s girl). Someone who there was nothing more to than wanting to be with this shitty bloke. And, unlike in Amy, Back to Black offers no slow build to reveal the rapport and chemistry between Amy and Blake, instead further reducing Winehouse to a desperate nitwit by making her throw herself at Fielder-Civil in the pub. But even worse than that is the creative decision to make it seem like Fielder-Civil was the one to introduce The Shangri-Las to Winehouse (something that will become a running, sentimental thread throughout the movie). As though someone as versed in musical history as she was wouldn’t be well-aware of that group on her own. This is someone who was immersed not only in jazz classics, but also Motown hits and girl groups of the 60s. This is why she once corrected an interviewer who mentioned The Ronettes looked like her by saying, “I look like them.” She knew her fuckin’ shit when it came to music and to try to make it seem like Fielder-Civil “schooled” her in any way, shape or form is absolutely egregious, and frankly, anti-feminist. 

As it is to reduce Winehouse to being obsessed with having kids to the point where she goes from outlandishly telling a Black girl in a convenience store, “We could be sisters” to escalating it way up a notch seconds later by adding, “I wish I was your mum.” Like, damn bia, all the girl wanted was your autograph. And yes, by this point in the movie, Winehouse is already in “trainwreck” mode, with the breakup between her and Blake having been shoddily portrayed as him casually deciding to go back to the woman based on ​​Sophie Schandorff, supposedly because Amy got too rough with him on the street during a drunken melee one night. Or maybe Fielder-Civil, in this version of events, was simply scared away by Winehouse’s hyper-intensity about getting married and starting a family. 

After all, who wouldn’t be terrified, if one is to go by a scene of Winehouse telling Fielder-Civil she wants to have six kids while they’re on a date at the zoo (which further makes Winehouse come across as a careless person)? Then there are the subsequent scenes to accent Winehouse’s general desperateness to be a mother that feature her and Blake sitting in the bathroom waiting for her pregnancy test results (she starts crying when the result is negative) or her sitting in a restaurant staring lovingly at a child before deciding to demand of her father, “Take me to rehab.” Uh, no. Winehouse was never the one to willingly go to rehab (hence, the earnestness of her hit song of the same name). It didn’t go down that way at all. And sure, there’s a thing called “creative license,” but this is just outright making shit up and totally botching/smushing together the timeline of events in her life (on that note, it’s telling that at no point does any indication of what year it is appear onscreen). Conflating everything to make it seem like Blake Fielder-Civil was the only aspect of her existence that had any importance to her. Oh sure, they lay on the grandma-loving element thick, too (which also feels like a Mitch-sanctioned piece of the story, in addition to having constant mentions in the dialogue about him warning her against using drugs, including marijuana). 

But where is the focus on her miscreant nature in school, where is the focus on her first important boyfriend, Chris Taylor (who famously told Winehouse, “You like a powerful man”), the focus on the nuanced rupture of her years-long relationship with her manager, Nick Shymansky, the focus on her stint in Saint Lucia, the focus on her father’s absence from her life when she was child—the most formative years? Despite being a biopic that likes to think it’s covering the “full scope” of Winehouse’s life—and how that life made her into someone with an addict’s personality—it is ultimately one big (barf-inducing) love letter to her relationship with Blake. Painting them as being “fated” to collide, the movie also does a terrible job at trying to give any context whatsoever about the Camden music scene at that time. How everything and everyone was so incestuous and interconnected. When Winehouse “quit” music for a bit in January of 2005 to “get drunk and play pool” every day, encountering a fellow Camden barfly like Blake was all but assured. Though Back to Black leaves out the part about Winehouse and Fielder-Civil also being connected through Trash, the club where so many Camden bands would play, and the place for which Blake would hand out fliers to promote events. 

Instead, the movie seems to be lying in wait the entire time to get to the part where Winehouse has a full-on breakdown, further spurring her drug addictions (and no, she didn’t arbitrarily decide to pick up a crack pipe herself [as the movie suggests], Blake introduced it to her). This is compounded by the death of her “nan” (played by Lesley Manville) in 2006, whose life is surrendered to her battle with lung cancer. In a similar fashion, one of the most important people in Britney Spears’ life, her aunt, Sandra Bridges Covington, died around the same time (January 2007) of ovarian cancer. These incredible losses in each singer’s life would send them into “off the rails” mode at the same moment in pop culture history—and all to the delight of the omnipresent paparazzi. Ready to snap the images of the trauma and self-flagellation in real time. And, needless to say, one could easily see the parallel between a cad like Kevin Federline and Blake Fielder-Civil. The difference, for Amy, was that her cad ended up actually going to prison to support his “bad boy” image. The charge? Assault and “perverting the course of justice” (by attempting to bribe the man he assaulted to keep quiet about it).  

In Back to Black’s estimation of things, prison was a time for Blake to get clean and magically reassess his relationship with her as one of “toxic codependency.” As if Fielder-Civil would actually want to end his claim to such a meal ticket because of that. No, in reality, it seemed Blake’s decision to file for divorce was a combination of wounded pride (the result of Winehouse’s flagrant infidelity on the island of Saint Lucia) and being counseled to “let her go.” As he stated in 2013, “…when I came out of jail I was told that if I loved her I’d divorce her and set her free and I did.” But a girl like Winehouse could never be free of her inner demons, the prison of her mind. Such is the curse of being a truly tortured artist. Someone who feels it all, 24/7. 

Rather than getting that aspect of Winehouse’s nature across in Back to Black, they diminish her to a two-dimensional embodiment of the melodramatic fool. And honestly, what the fuck is with a so-called ending that features her singing her own song, “Tears Dry On Their Own,” in 2011 (the same year, the movie emphasizes, that she hears news of Fielder-Civil having a son with Sarah Aspin—later, Fielder-Civil’s daughter would not so coincidentally end up sharing the same middle name as Amy: Jade)? Anyone who saw Winehouse’s final performance in Serbia or knew of her emotional state at all regarding the Back to Black album knows that the last thing she would be singing in the privacy of her own home was anything from that record. Clearly, Greenhalgh had no idea how or where to end the “biopic” and this was the “best,” “most abstract” thing he could come up with. Which is to say, total cornball shite that only depicts Winehouse as continuously pining over Fielder-Civil even though she had well moved on from the relationship by that point. As she walks up the stairs, the scene flashes to white and then fades out to leave the audience with three generic title cards about her death (the date, the cause, etc.). 

The quote that Greenhalgh wants to hammer audiences over the head with comes back at the end, too. The one taken from the recently released “biography,” Amy: In Her Words: “I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes… I want to be remembered for being just me.” But Back to Black ultimately seeks to make her be remembered for being just obsessed and enmeshed with Blake. 

And so, one must ask: what in the actual fuck is the point of making a biopic if you’re going to make it this bad? This totally out of sync with the person it’s about? The level of trashiness that Back to Black reaches shouldn’t be surprising considering this is the director who brought us Fifty Shades of Grey. And yet, still, it’s somehow shocking that such a hackneyed, misogynistic script could have been greenlit. Worse still, its TV movie status (little better than Lifetime’s Britney Ever After) is something that the producers and production companies attempt to polish into “Oscar gold” by funneling as much money as possible into the budget (one that extends to buying the music rights for featuring numerous well-known songs beyond just Amy’s…like Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop [That Thing],” which Winehouse, looking peak white girl, cringingly sings, hums or “bops” along to on the streets and public transports of London).

But you can’t polish a turd—particularly not for those fans who know better. Indeed, it’s unclear who this movie is actually supposed to be for apart from Mitch Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil, both likely splooging over how vindicated their own “legacies” come across in this movie. Even though the tagline for it promises, “Her life. Her music. Her legacy.” Just another way in which Back to Black makes a mockery of all those things when it comes to Amy.