'Back To Black' Is Offensive To Amy Winehouse (And To Us)
#273: "Back To Black," "Dune: Part Two," John Mulaney, "Dances With Wolves," "The Iron Claw"
Edition 273:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Amy Winehouse is the latest celebrity to get the biopic treatment. Is this one any better? Plus, Dune 2 just hit streaming, and John Mulaney is winning 2024. Kevin Costner…well…we’ll see. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a horror serial killer investigation that showed me one thing I’ve never seen before in movies.
Back To Black
By now, audiences are quite used to the girl power biopic counterfactual: you know… I, Tonya, Jackie, Spencer, Priscilla, I Wanna Dance With Somebody and so on. These movies are almost never good, but they have been mostly effective as a kind of public image rehab. It makes sense why they exist, to please (and extract money from) hardcore fans while keeping the brand relevant for future generations. And by the way, this “reclaiming of the narrative” by casting yourself as the well-intentioned victim to powerful oppressive forces isn’t exclusive to tragic female celebrities either (see Rocketman, Elvis and especially the upcoming Michael.
If Back To Black was aspiring to join this sub-genre, it has failed at the most basic level of fan service. What we want are the hits, big and loud (even a movie as bad as Bohemian Rhapsody understood this), but this movie, which spans 10 years of Amy Winehouse’s life while focusing on the creation of the album that gives the movie its name, shows little interest in championing her genius.
That would be fine, in the case of some insightful or searing portrait of a life that can at best be considered a tragedy, ended at age 27 from alcohol poisoning. However, the plot is basically a series of enactments of song lyrics from the album, literally. For example, her manager tells her to go to rehab and she says “no no no,” then asks her dad for support and he says she doesn’t need to (“I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine”). It’s like…remember that dumb scene in Solo where Han gets assigned his last name? And you’re watching like the pointing Rick Dalton meme. Oh oh oh it’s that thing from that thing!! That’s the whole movie.
What that does in the aggregate is rob Winehouse of the credit for translating her life experiences into the songs that have continued to resonate for years after her death. Sure, we get the classic music biopic thing where a young Amy sits on her bed staring blankly into the middle distance, gets a lightbulb moment then strums out a fully formed iconic pop song in one take. But the songs feel more like tragic diary entries, and their success is cast as both inevitable and unimportant.
It’s surprising to me to read that the Winehouse family did not have any input in the creative here (especially considering the green light from the estate to use her music), because the movie seems interested in settling scores. It exists fully in the shadow of Asif Kapadia’s brilliant 2015 documentary Amy, which uses archive footage and audio to deeply examine the maelstrom from which Winehouse produced her best work yet also succumbed to her vices. The doc is empathetic, but unsparing.
In response, Back To Back goes out of its way to clear Winehouse’s father (an enabler) and boyfriend (the match to a powder keg) and pretty much everyone else from any wrongdoing. So wait…Winehouse’s childhood was completely happy, and the only bad thing that happened to her was her grandmother dying in old age? Ope, the crack cocaine, where did that come from??
Left with neither stand up and shout moments of fandom (with one notable exception near the end) nor fresh insights to explain the personal woes, I think the movie actually damages Amy Winehouse’s longterm reputation — that is, if anyone actually watches it.
Marisa Abela is an actress I like quite a bit in HBO’s “Industry,” and I give her credit here for doing a pretty good job of mimicking Winehouse’s completely unique vocals. To me, she was miscast, bringing to the part a bigheartedness that blunted Winehouse’s defiant, shit-stirring demeanor.
The same goes for Jack O’Connell, who is enormously charming in the meet-cute between Amy and Blake in a pub (the best scene in the movie by far), but brings to it no hint of mischief for a character who was a convicted drug dealer. Not sure if he is to blame or, more likely, that’s exactly how they wanted to portray Blake.
In general, I find it pretty unhelpful to bash this hard on a smaller movie that few people are going to go see anyway. In this case I think it’s called for simply because Hollywood is obsessed with celebrity biopics, and there’s no end in sight — Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Linda Ronstadt and the Beatles are all coming our way in the next year or two. As long as this continues to be a thing, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand more than what this movie provided.
Something New
Dune: Part Two (Max): We’re quietly five full months into 2024, and it’s pretty incredible how no movie has risen to come even close to competing with Dune 2 for best movie of the year. I wasn’t as rapturous in my review of the movie as many others, but had I been grading it relative to its competition so far this year, I would’ve changed my tune. Given that it just got added to streaming, I wonder if a rewatch would resolve some of the story issues I had the first time around. Can’t wait to find out.
John Mulaney (Netflix): The stand-up comedian’s impromptu late night-style talk show “Everybody’s In LA” was one of Netflix’s breakout hits of the year, and then he sat for a confessional, almost like “60 Minutes” kind of interview with David Letterman’s “My Next Guest” show (also on Netflix…no coincidence).
Something Old
Dances With Wolves (1990, Tubi): Get ready to see a whole lot of Kevin Costner this summer. The normally very private guy is going to be on every podcast, talk show and YouTube channel pimping his TWO Horizon westerns, which he wrote, directed, starred in and reportedly put $38 million of his own money into. It’s a massive bet that the American moviegoing public still love Kevin Costner, one I’m quite frankly pretty skeptical will pay off.
Dances With Wolves came right at the peak of our collective love affair with Costner (in one four year stretch 1987-91 he did The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (lol) and JFK), when he could make a three-hour western epic that has mostly aged like unpasteurized milk and Hollywood was like yes, here’s SEVEN Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director.
This movie exists now as kind of a museum piece of Hollywood grandeur, still very much worth watching for all cinephiles to grasp the peak of the earnest, schmaltzy 1980s filmmaking style. If you embrace that ethos across its super long runtime, you may just be moved.
Something to Stream
Iron Claw (Max): It is baffling to me why A24 did not make more of a marketing push for this movie toward awards consideration last fall, because I’m quite confident it could’ve contended in a handful of categories. Perhaps that speaks to just how much it snuck up on people, including myself. After all, it’s “wrestling, a B picture” as Barton Fink would say, a true blue tragedy about a pro wrestling family in the 1970s.
It’s the type of movie that you just expect to be okay, ~fine~, but definitely not to be so emotionally impactful or resonant. You don’t expect any human being to be as jacked as Zac Efron is here, and even more surprising, he gives the best acting performance of his career. I still think about this movie, and definitely would’ve slotted it into my top 15 for 2023 had I seen it last year. As it happens, they just added this movie to the Max library. If you missed it in theaters I highly recommend. You can read my full review HERE.
Trailer Watch: Longlegs
Love me a good serial killer movie, and this one is doing its best to give off Se7en and Silence of the Lambs vibes, albeit with a decidedly more horror aesthetic. What really caught my attention was the noise made by the monster in this trailer, which is a noise I don’t think I’ve ever heard before and therefore is quite effective at freaking me out.
As I’ve said many times, my favorite use of horror is as a small budget platform for a rising filmmaker to showcase his or her talent. We’ll see if writer/director Oz Perkins is up to the task here.