Poor Amy Winehouse, the singer whose short, blistering career is being commemorated in a new feature film. The trailer for Back to Black, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, dropped earlier this week, with the actress Marisa Abela (best known from Industry) taking on the role of Camden’s own Maria Callas.
Winehouse, who died in 2011 from alcohol poisoning, has provided rich material for filmmakers. Taylor-Johnson’s film follows two documentaries about the singer, including Amy, directed by Asif Kapadia, which charted her addiction to fame, toxic men and stimulants and was nominated for numerous awards. That we continue to pick over the carcass of the Winehouse tragedy is perhaps inevitable, given her youth, talent and prodigious personality. Yet, it doesn’t make it any less sad.
Taylor-Johnson has justified her feature on the basis of their shared creative “DNA”. “My connection to Amy began when I left college and was hanging out in the creatively diverse London borough of Camden,” she said in a statement. “I first saw her perform at a talent show at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, and it was immediately obvious she wasn’t just ‘talent’ . . . she was genius.”
Genius is often cited as a cause for artistic probing — and performers doing performances of performers has long been an awards-jury kink. In recent years we’ve seen Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury, and Taron Egerton doing Elton. Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing Édith Piaf, and Bradley Cooper is now gunning for recognition for his role as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, his self-scripted, produced and directed film. Cooper spent six years trying to mimic Bernstein and his hyperactive conducting manner. I read in an apparently irony-free interview that Abela’s voice coach trained her “like an athlete” to inhabit Winehouse’s honeyed vocals and drug-emaciated frame.
I have nothing against a biopic. I’ve just never seen one that hasn’t been completely bested by some documentary on the same theme. All the efforts made by Cooper during Maestro make a pathetic substitute for the 90-minute episode of the BBC’s Omnibus, sadly no longer available on iPlayer, in which Bernstein conducts a complete recording of his 1957 musical West Side Story, for the first time, in 1984. We see stars, including José Carreras and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, follow his precise, exacting and sometimes terrifying instructions. Bernstein is by turns charming, funny and exasperated, and the film is charged with such nervous tension that even Hitchcock could take notes.
Maestro, a flabby walk through the conductor’s unconventional personal life, offers less emotional understanding of Bernstein’s process and imagination than the documentary captures in one note. Likewise, much will be made of Abela’s commitment to aping Winehouse’s vocals, but without the timbre of Winehouse’s experience, it’s another karaoke show.
Biopics are an inevitable feature of a world in which intellectual property is more valuable than original creative thought. Why bother making up a story if you can just re-dress one that has already been exhaustively retold? This week, we have also seen the spectre of George Michael rising from the dead: the singer, who died in 2016, will resume “live public performances” next year, according to records filed at Companies House by his estate.
During his lifetime, Michael was fiercely protective of exploiting or further monetising his back catalogue: attempts to create a jukebox musical or documentaries about his career stuttered for years before his death. One assumes that the live performance will take the form of a hologram, as with the Abba show Voyage. But without Michael’s actual participation, as with Björn, Benny and the ladies, one feels the experience will ring hollow.
Winehouse makes for a compelling story because the memory of her sad existence is still raw. And, truthfully, having watched the trailer more than once, the exhumation of her story revolts and fascinates at the same time.
I suspect the reason we keep returning to the Winehouse story tells a broader story about public culpability in her untimely death. Just as we revisit the story of Princess Diana, interminably, there seems to be an unspoken collective understanding that had there not been an audience for every ghastly microdetail of their existence, the two women still might be alive.
Recent retellings of Winehouse’s story have framed her death, at 27, on some conveniently specific cause: she was manipulated by self-interested individuals, she was a casualty of bad parenting, she was too headstrong and wilful to be helped. These narratives have perhaps assuaged us: her death was not our fault. The woman so relentlessly pursued by the paparazzi that she secured an injunction forbidding any “persons unknown” seeking to photograph her was actually the victim of her own fatalistic mind.
The Winehouse film has been backed by the Amy Winehouse estate, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Publishing, which will no doubt boost the coffers of one and all. It’s also been welcomed by her friends, such as producer Mark Ronson, who, while not involved with its production, read the script and said it reminded him of her humour: “It really caught that well.”
Many people are invested in the Winehouse legacy, but one can’t shake the feeling that its existence inculpates us all. Her career, which peaked in parallel with one of the worst periods of British press intrusion, exacerbated her vulnerability as a young, undereducated woman (she dropped out of school at 16). Back to Black will reignite these passions once again.
Amy Winehouse should still be singing, now aged 40, fulfilling her genius to this day. Does a biopic exonerate these feelings, or does it compound our shame further still?
Email Jo at [email protected]
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