“Back to Black” Review: Newcomer Marisa Abela Gives Powerful, Breakthrough Performance as Amy Winehouse
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The film is full of romantic heartbreak but reluctant to let in too much darkness
Courtesy of Dean Rogers/Focus Features
“I tread a troubled track.” So sang Amy Winehouse on her desolate 2007 single “Back to Black.” A confessional pop poet, the British singer didn’t lie: The public watched in dismayed fascination as she repeatedly went off that track — she suffered from bulimia and ravaged her body with booze and heroin — before finally plunging into total darkness. She died at age 27 in 2011.
Her story was previously told in the Oscar-winning 2015 documentary Amy, a superb film that was harrowing in detailing the singer's addictions. Back to Black, which takes a more conventionally sympathetic approach, at times plays like a bleaker, nastier Funny Girl.
At least the movie has been fortunate in casting Marisa Abela (HBO’s Industry) in the main role.
Her resemblance to Winehouse is striking, especially as she totters around beneath a high spider’s nest of black hair — she has some of the singer’s tatterdemalion glamour — and her vocal impersonation is terrific.
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But it’s not a transcendent performance, the sort that awes and thrills you with an actress’s bravura and muscle — and it needs to be. Abela has been given just one scene that seems to really capture Winehouse’s chaotic power: At a stadium concert, a dangerously woozy Winehouse leaves the stage to try to connect with fans pressing against a barrier below. She runs unsteadily back and forth across a wooden platform, singing with inebriated abandon as security tries to prevent her from hurting herself. It’s a great, scary diva moment.
Beyond that, Black is too cautiously soft about Winehouse’s decline — the film is a giant sofa cushion for her to slowly sink into and disappear.
Dean Rogers/Focus Features
Abela with Jack O'Connell, who plays Winehouse's lover and husband Blake Fielder-Civil.The focus is on her disastrous relationship with and brief marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, played by Jack O’Connell with a hard sexual allure.
Blake is a lean, edgy bad boy who introduces Winehouse to heroin (as well as the classic girl groups that become such an influence on her sound). It’s her heartbreak over Fielder-Civil, Black suggests, that triggers Winehouse’s fatal drinking binge. (Her blood alcohol level was five times higher than the legal limit for driving.)
Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan) is quietly sad-eyed as Winehouse’s father, Mitch, a former cabdriver whose role in her life has been controversial. There’s no mention here of My Daughter Amy, the intrusive, poorly judged TV documentary for which he shot footage of Amy in St. Lucia, where she’d retreated for a period of recovery and rejuvenation.
See this film for Abela — but stream Amy too. And listen to “Back to Black,” which in its final notes fades away like a distant, hopeless SOS.
Back to Black is in theaters now.
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