How Marisa Abela brought Amy Winehouse back to life in ‘better’ biopic

Marisa Abela’s portrayal of Amy Winehouse elevates new biopic Back to Black to the next level, writes Leigh Paatsch.

BACK TO BLACK (M)

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy)

Starring: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan

Rating: ****

Restoring light to a dark place

“I want to be remembered for being a singer,” declares Amy Winehouse (played by rising star Marisa Abela) in an early scene of Back To Black.

That one line is a clear mission statement for what turns out to be an impressive, sincere and tastefully rendered portrait of a vital artist. A unique musician who realised her immense talent very quickly, and was lost to her own demons way too soon.

The end result is one of the better “jukebox biopics” to have graced a cinema in recent years: superior in every department to the factual fantasia proposed by Elton John’s Rocketman, and the drab, inert inelegance of Bob Marley’s One Love.

While Back To Black hardly dances around the doomed outcome forged by Amy Winehouse’s openly addictive personality, it does hold a singular focus on her music.

While the movie hardly dances around the doomed outcome forged by Winehouse’s openly addictive personality, it does hold a singular focus on her music.

Not only on how that music extracted such supreme compositional and performative magic from Winehouse at such a relatively early age. But also how that music – and how much of her own experiences, emotions and essence she selflessly poured into it – may have sealed Winehouse’s tragic fate.

As the title of the movie itself implies, most of the initial roads navigated through Winehouse’s short life led to her creation of what stands as a true pop music masterpiece: the 2006 album Back To Black.

The movie expertly examines the key influences and events that shaped Winehouse’s gifts so definitively.

Aside from a nurturing (though fractured) family life and an enduringly wicked sense of humour, the controversial factor that both pushed Winehouse to deserved greatness and then shoved her towards an undeserved demise is not shied away from here.

Marisa Abela and Jack O'Connell as Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil.

The name of that factor was none other than Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), at once the great love of her love (they were married for a while there), the inspiration for her most heartbreaking songs (the couple were invariably apart more than they were together), and the influence that led her astray repeatedly (he was a 24/7 addict of a wide array of substances).

Fusing all of this difficult and often contradictory material into a soulful and satisfying whole is Marisa Abela’s remarkable portrayal of Amy Winehouse. While her vocal performances are eerily accurate, Abela’s ability to convey the singular spirit of Winehouse is what elevates Back to Black to the next level.

Back to Black is in cinemas now

CIVIL WAR (MA15+)

Rating: ****1/2

General release

Kirsten Dunst in Civil War.

Not often you come across a mainstream movie as provocative, challenging and single-minded in its vision as this. As the story begins, American society has already torn itself apart. Regime change is on the way, and rebel forces are en route to Washington DC, where a dangerously unhinged President will be symbolically evicted from the White House. However, not all of the nation is ready to reunite under one flag. There are pockets of resistance everywhere. Entire states are still run by lawless militia whose only policy is to shoot first and never ask any questions later. It is across 1200km of this volatile territory that a handful of photographers and journalists must travel if they are to make it to Washington in time for the historic storming of the nation’s capital.

A nagging sense of dread continues to intensify throughout Civil War.

Though not an action movie, this is a movie where people’s actions – those instinctive choices made under extreme duress – dominate each and every scene. The mood conjured by filmmaker Alex Garland and his accomplished cast (led by Kirsten Dunst, Wagener Moura and Cailee Spaeny) is as powerful as it is relentless. A nagging sense of dread continues to intensify throughout, triggering thoughts that many a democratic country might only be an election away from entering the geopolitical hell mapped out here.

SCOOP (M)

Rating: ***1/2

Now streaming on Netflix

Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson in Scoop on Netflix.

It was one of the dumbest media moves of all time, and yet it resulted in one of the most dynamic hours of television to be ever broadcast. A well-paced and sharply scripted affair, Scoop tells the true story of how Prince Andrew sat down for a disastrous extended interview with the BBC in 2019. The intended idea of the chat was to smooth away the thornier accusations swirling around the embattled royal in the wake of the death of his old pal, notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew assumed he could make all the rumours vanish – particularly the pointed accusation that Epstein gave him free access to his stable of underage ‘masseuses’ – with a little self-deprecating charm and a lot of strategically worded denials. Instead, he made a bad situation infinitely worse with a calamitous on-camera display that still boggles the mind today.

As far as factual re-enactments go, this is both consistently entertaining and highly informative stuff. Rufus Sewell contributes the right notes of entitled delusion as Andrew, a solid performance matched closely by those of co-stars Gillian Anderson (as interviewer Emily Mattis) and Billie Piper (as segment booker Sam McAlister).