I ain’t no f***ing Spice Girl! London, the 1990s. Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) grows up in a Jewish family with her Sinatra-loving cab driver father Mitch (Eddie Marsa) and her grandmother ‘Nan,’ Cynthia Levy (Lesley Manville) big influences on her with their love for jazz music and singing. After she has graduated from the Brit School and is gigging around town, Amy’s friend Tyler James (Spike Fearn) hands his manager Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan) at 19 (Simon Fuller’s label) a demo tape of Amy’s recording and he is impressed by her talent. She then signs a contract with Island Records and releases her first album Frank. After enjoying success, her record label wish to alter some changes with her stage act, which Amy strongly disagrees with, aghast at having her performance style critiqued. I just want people to hear my voice, and forget their troubles for five minutes. Amy then reveals she needs time off to live her songs and meets Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) in The Good Mixer pub in Camden Town where they fall in love at first sight: he introduces her to the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack and a new image is born along with a new addiction. Their relationship is soon troubled by Blake’s cocaine addiction, Amy’s alcoholism and her bulimia. After experiencing Amy’s irritable behaviour which regularly results in Blake being beaten up by her, he thinks they would be better as friends and wants to work on things with his ex-girlfriend Becky (Therica Wilson-Read) which leaves Amy heartbroken. Just before going to New York she learns Nan is dying of lung cancer. After a difficult period of these traumatising events all happening at once, she then gathers inspiration to write her hit album Back to Black, a portrait of her recent heartbreak. Blake and Amy reconcile shortly after the release. They get married in Miami, Florida – to Mitch’s dismay. Shortly afterwards, Blake is arrested and serves a two year-sentence in prison for perverting the course of justice in a GBH case. Before he is released, with Amy now a serious drug addict, Blake reveals he has been having counselling and informs Amy that he wishes to divorce as he wants a fresh start … Everyone out there thinks you’re the way you are because of me. Musical biopics are a gnarly topic which we’ve delved into before. Amy Winehouse has already had her life explored by Asif Kapadia’s stunning 2015 documentary and along with her music which was so confessional and personal to her immediate circumstances we feel we knew her. She has never really left. She was preternaturally gifted, hilarious and warm, well read, a brilliant interviewee and of course a stunning singer-songwriter. She was also an addict. To drink, to weed and eventually to Class A drugs and to men – cut down out of the template of her grandmother, a former paramour of jazz icon Ronnie Scott, whose club features here a lot. Blake becomes the prism through which she views her existence but that wasn’t all the story even if this is framed that way. The screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh hits the conventional beats but somehow the intensity and colour are flattened – Camden doesn’t seem all that, her friends aren’t around in the way they seemed in other accounts, relationships and sessions with musicians and the band aren’t even properly dramatised. Mitch is just a nice old geezer who drops in now and again: no mention of the C4 TV documentary trailing Amy to rehab in the Caribbean, his efforts to hog the limelight or his regular talks with journos, all of which contributed to negative commentary in the wake of his daughter’s shockingly early death. Is this how Amy was? Sometimes this is more like word association than screen storytelling – everything is linked through the titular album’s songs and it is of course a modern classic, a portrait of the young Londoner in her prime pining for the no-good chancer who brings out the best and the worst in her. Blake comes across pretty well all things considered and during their first afternoon together his charm is all too present in O’Connell’s performance. During a prison visit it takes him to tell Amy a psychologist has explained the nature of their deadly self-sabotaging attraction – we are toxic co-dependents – whether this is true or not there is a tilt against the protagonist who appears to be denied self-knowledge in this entire uneven scenario. It’s only through her songs and performances she exhibits the chutzpah for which she was acclaimed. While the paparazzi are a neverending presence and lay siege to her in her home, provoking her in the way they tend to do to their prey, there isn’t even a montage of tabloids or magazines for those who might not be as aware as her fans or contemporary observers of the particular way in which she was terrorised and goaded by them (the Noughties, eh?). Ultimately Amy as a character seems like an accident waiting to happen – all the right influences came out the wrong way, and that, coupled with an addictive and obsessive personality which in this cocoon-like version doesn’t show all her colours, occasionally makes us query the music’s origins. It’s like an afterthought. Crucially, there’s no Bo Rhap moment – when Freddie almost jumps out of his skin at the piano as he feels that song emanating from his very being. How odd to deprive Amy of her voice in creativity, dipping that contralto to hit emotions that bared her soul. The hugely impressive Abela is striking when it comes to vocalising the legendary lyrics used as essential exposition, sometimes very wittily. Hamstrung by matters of taste, sympathy, delicacy versus the visibly trashy and tumultuous way that drama queen Amy lived, this finishes up at a rather middle of the road tone. We never see her taking drugs out of her extravagant beehive hairdo – surely a visual that director and renowned artist Sam Taylor-Johnson could have mined for humour. It wasn’t all desperate – this was a professional who had a fabulous career. Grandmother Cynthia clearly lived through Amy’s character, making her a dubious mentor for an impressionable young girl with a voice beyond her years and an old school writing talent. At this juncture Amy’s life feels ever more surreal, a vividly inked question mark in a horror movie in which she is the Final Girl, all spruced up and wealthy with her Grammy awards and nowhere to go and nobody to care. In reality she had a boyfriend at the end of her life but he doesn’t feature here. By the age of 23 Amy achieved her career ambitions – and then some – and it took another four years to have her die after sobering up, dragged this place and that by greedy managers when she could barely stand, performing private gigs for Russian Jewish billionaires, making legendary concert appearances and having fun with her friends. Without Blake, this suggests, she simply wasn’t really Amy. This is a tame film about a wild girl which as a wannabe tragic jazz gal she would probably have loathed. Wait until the end of the credits to hear Song for Amy by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis who are in charge of the score. It’s wonderful. We only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times
mondomovies 