It’s back to Amy again… but this time in celebration
In 2015, when I reviewed Asif Kapadia’s powerful documentary about the late Amy Winehouse, I wrote that Amy ‘will be acutely uncomfortable viewing both for her father, Mitch, and for her party-loving ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil’.
Both men will be much happier with Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new dramatisation of the same events, Back To Black. Mitch because he’s restored to the role of loving, supportive father and played by Eddie Marsan at his most likeable, and Fielder-Civil because he’s portrayed, not as the man who introduced Amy to hard drugs but as a charming cockney chancer played by handsome Jack O’Connell.
And therein lies both the weakness and the strength of the film: it’s been given something of a ‘Hollywood makeover’.
It’s a difficult thing to say but Marisa Abela, who some will recognise from TV’s Industry and plays Winehouse rather brilliantly, is prettier than Winehouse was in real life, while Lesley Manville is adorable as Amy’s maternal grandmother, Cynthia, a jazz singer herself as well as getting the credit for her granddaughter’s trademark beehive.
But the booze, drugs and bulimia are all still there, along with the unavoidably awful ending. Taylor John son’ s creative vision, however, is essentially affectionate and celebratory rather than insightful and
revelatory which, given that poor Winehouse has been dead for 13 years, seems not unreasonable. She wants us to like her Amy, and she wants us to like her film. And I did, just as I liked Taylor-Johnson’s not dissimilar treatment of John Lennon, Nowhere Boy, in 2009.
Back To Black may be a bit light on actual black but Abela’s singing (she doesn’t lip-synch) is amazing. It’s refreshing to see the now permanently tragic figure of Winehouse actually having fun, and the music is simply wonderful.
Any film from Alex Garland, he of Ex Machina and 28 Days Later, comes with high expectations, and maybe that’s the problem with Civil War, a disconcertingly timely thriller that never lands the punches we expect.
A Trump-like president, played fleetingly by Nick Offerman, is besieged in the White House. He’s already served an unconstitutional third term and abolished the FBI, but now the Western Forces of California and Texas are closing in. War photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) must race from New York to land possibly the president’s last ever interview.
But they’re also taking along, for no obvious good reason, veteran writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and young wannabe photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Who, of course, reminds Lee of herself.
Essentially, this is a perilous road movie of the type often associated with zombie flicks like… well, 28 Days Later. Only this time the hundreds of debris-strewn miles between the Big Apple and DC are full of soldiers who’ve forgotten which side they’re fighting for, atrocities that need to be photographed and a lot of danger.
Dunst is rather good but there’s never enough at stake, Garland’s own screenplay feels episodic and predictable and some of the closequarter action is unconvincing.
Another road trip, this time between San Diego and Santa Fe, is at the heart of Bleeding Love, which sees Ewan McGregor playing a father driving his troubled daughter (played by McGregor’s real-life daughter, Clara) apparently to see an artist friend.
But as withdrawal symptoms set in and the hunt for booze and pills begins, it’s clear that the unhappy young woman might be heading somewhere different. It takes a while to find its stride but the McGregors are rather good together in a film that takes both parenthood and addiction seriously.
Only a pop song can take you straight back to a particular moment, says a character in The Greatest Hits but the problem for Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is that it really does. She only has to hear a tune from her past to pass out, travel back in time and, for the umpteenth time, try to prevent the death of her boyfriend. And then she meets a new guy and… no, it’s Groundhog Day meets High Fidelity and too exasperatingly silly to explain.