Reality isn’t a story; stories have structure, meaning, purpose. Turning one into the other is necessarily a process of making decisions that add all of those things; the skill of storytelling lies in doing this well, creatively and appropriately, and – perhaps – subtly, especially if you’re trying to retell events that actually happened.
There are various kinds of based-on-a-true-story film and they each tend to have their own conventions. In the last few years, probably because of the enormous success of Bohemian Rhapsody, the pop-rock biopic has been particularly in vogue. What you’re looking at with this kind of film is…
- title shared with one of the subject’s biggest hits, regardless of relevance
- fresh-faced newcomer getting big break in the title role
- tick-box account of rise from humble origins to world-conquering success, with profound subtext that fame and money don’t necessarily make you happy
- unflinching depiction of decline followed by either redemptive comeback or (flashback to) greatest moment of triumph
- delicate and understated handling of final moments prior to untimely death, if appropriate.
And you get all of this stuff in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black. Taylor-Johnson used to be an up and coming artist before having a go at making films (this seems to have become a bit of a well-trodden route, if you recall that Steve McQueen (not the one from Bullitt) did the same thing). Expectations that STJ would make films that were arty and profound were probably not met when she ended up doing the first Fifty Shades movie, which to be fair is something she now regrets going anywhere near (yeah, I can sympathise).
Anyway, now she is back with a pop bio-pic which does not feature a sex dungeon in any capacity. As should be fairly obvious, this is an account of the career and personal life of Amy Winehouse, who is played by Marisa Abela. The film has a somewhat disarmingly earnestness a lot of the time, setting out its thesis quite openly from the very beginning: Amy Winehouse, we are basically told, was a tremendously gifted young woman destined to become a massive international star, a restless free spirit who just wanted a loving and united family around her.
Hmmm, well, fair enough. The early section of the film features some interesting tidbits of information, always assuming they genuinely are true – one of Winehouse’s early romances ended awkwardly when she wrote a song describing her boyfriend as a ladyboy. But a lot of it is pretty on-the-nose – ‘I ain’t no ****ing Spice Girl,’ she growls down the phone to a prospective manager, which is surely heading towards cultural snobbery from the scriptwriters.
Anyway – first album: fairly big hit, but troubles with the record company; Winehouse takes a break and encounters Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film makes clear is trouble from the word go. But poor old Amy, bless her, is so in thrall to her emotions that she falls helplessly in love with this drug-addicted bad boy. After the first encounter they seldom seem to actually be happy together and when he dumps her she goes off and writes Back to Black, the album that ends up making her an international star.
But Blake comes back into her life, mainly motivated (the film states) by a desire to get a slice of the Winehouse riches and pay off his drug debts. Needless to say his presence, and that of the constantly-circling paparazzi, end up having dire consequences for the singer…
It all sort of hangs together as a narrative, I think, and I’m sure nearly everything depicted has some kind of factual basis. However, it’s impossible not to see this film and suspect it may have been made as a reaction to Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy. Kapadia’s film was brutally direct in suggesting that the worst of Winehouse’s troubles were the result of her closest family resisting calls for her to go into rehab, as this would involve cancelling concerts and other appearances and thus the amount of money flowing in their general direction – which certainly gives a new significance to the lyric ‘my daddy thinks I’m fine’. Winehouse’s father Mitch (played here by Eddie Marsan) reportedly thought the documentary was horrible; needless to say, for the Winehouse family were involved in making the new film, he is portrayed very straightforwardly as a loving, attentive parent.
But you’ve got to have a story beyond blaming Amy Winehouse’s death on a) Blake Fielder-Civil getting her hooked on drugs and b) the paparazzi chasing her around all the time, and the film’s decision is to pin it on the fact that Winehouse supposedly had a persistent inner sadness about not having children. This keeps being crowbarred into the script via lines like ‘I wanna be a mum!’ ‘I wanna have six children!’ (this to Fielder-Civil on what’s effectively their first date) and ‘I wish I was your mum’ (to a very junior fan). What finally and fatally pushed her off the wagon, we are informed, was learning (from a pap, no less) that Fielder-Civil had had a child with his new partner. There is virtually no documentary evidence to support any of this, and indeed some which contradicts it – the film suggests that Winehouse had cleaned up, turned a corner, and was on an upward trajectory prior to her death, disregarding a well-attested account of her complaining to a friend after winning five Grammy awards that life was just unbearably boring without drugs.
So we’re dealing with a rather suspect narrative here – or so it seems to me, anyway. Nevertheless, no doubt it will become the Authorised Version of the Winehouse tale – there were a lot of people of all ages at the screening I attended, most of whom I suspect wouldn’t have seen the Kapadia documentary. And, as a technical piece of film-making, there’s not much to snipe about here in terms of the direction or performances. Abela is very good, doing all her own vocals – this is perhaps her greatest achievement – and people like Marsan and Lesley Manville (as Amy’s nan) are always reliable screen presences. Banging soundtrack too, of course. But all of the film’s obvious virtues become just a bit suspect if you consider that the story it tells may be distanced from reality to an extent and in a way that does its subject’s memory little justice.
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