Back to Black

“Back to Black” is a 2024 biographical drama film based on the life of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, portrayed by Marisa Abela. It delves into Winehouse’s rise to fame, tumultuous relationships, and the making of her Grammy-winning album, “Back to Black.”

Back to Black Review

In a film glorifying a manic alcoholic, “artiste” spiraling out of control only to crash land into an early grave, Back to Black benefits from capable, surprisingly self-restrained hands behind the camera. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (50 Shades of Grey) and shot by cinematographer Polly Morgan (The Woman King), Back to Black never manages to engender non-fans to its subject or build any emotional bonds to the narrative.

Furthermore, the film’s earnest performances never quite transcend to captivating. This is almost entirely due to the light in which Winehouse is portrayed as emotionally immature and seemingly unpleasant. Further hindering the actors is the prioritization of intervals that ostensibly took place between more traditionally interesting dramatic moments, robbing the performers of their chance to stretch and shine and stealing any opportunity for the audience to connect.

One notable example is that of a drug-induced fight between Whinehouse and her husband. In lieu of what must have been an emotionally charged confrontation and the almost certainly empathetically identifiable details leading up to it, the film depicts the conclusion of them chasing one another down several very public streets and its quick resolutive embrace.

Perhaps this resolution would feel meaningful if we were ever given a reason to bond with the characters outside of Amy’s talent. Unfortunately, even her adoration for her grandmother (one of the only interpersonal relationships even mildly explored in the film) is portrayed as shallowly based on her “style” and early sexual exploits. The same can be said for the alcoholism for which Winehouse is as well known as for that of her music. While she is regularly shown drowning her feelings in a bottle, the root cause of her addiction isn’t much explored beyond the sentiment, “That’s just Amy.”

Without a doubt, Winehouse was a beautiful vocalist and a talented composer. However, the over-celebrated perceived “edginess” of her beehive hairdo, ample tattoos, and tendency to intersperse crass lyrics and curse words into traditional-sounding soulful jazz, along with her unfortunate and virtually unexplored substance abuse, isn’t enough to carry a nearly two-hour narrative.

WOKE ELEMENTS

NOTE: I would have rated the Woke-O-Meter lower save for the fact that the film strongly portrayed the importance of a loving father in Winehouse’s life. Despite some of her lyrics, the film also clearly showed that she yearned for a more traditional life as a wife and mother. Subsequently, it boosted the percentage.

Dash of Man-Hate

• Some of the lyrics to songs sung early in the film glorify the degradation of men.

This One is Tough

• The big one—the one that cost the movie most of the 50 points that I removed but could arguably be ignored or cause to mark the movie as completely Woke—is that of its message. Winehouse is portrayed as a manic and substance abuser who repeatedly physically abused her husband and ultimately killed herself with alcohol. She’s also (especially in the first half of the film) portrayed as an unlikable and sarcastic brat who is overly dramatic, rude, and thoughtless. However, it’s very difficult to tell whether the film’s tone is one of celebrating these qualities as the mark of a “strong, independent woman” who carved out her own path or if it intends to show how these personality traits led to her early demise.
  • Ultimately, I heavily penalized it due to the film’s last line, a narrated reading from a letter Winehouse wrote as a young(er) girl. It read something to the effect that she just had to be herself. This would suggest a celebration even though “being herself” meant dying of alcohol poisoning before the age of 30.

The post Back to Black first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Bob Marley: One Love

Bob Marley seemingly had an interesting life. He was abandoned by his mother at the age of 10 and left to raise himself in the unstable and violent ruins of what was only years before Colonial Jamaica. Later, he was targeted for execution for daring to sing songs about peace and love. All the while, he maintained a complex relationship with his wife, full of mistresses and dual families. Were Bob Marley: One Love to have spent more than a few minutes on these things, perhaps the film would have been compelling.

Instead, three-quarters of One Love tells the tale of what was ostensibly the easiest time in his life. After narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt, Marley moves his wife and children to the United States to live with his mother while he spends a bachelor’s year in England writing and playing music in his room, writing and playing music with his band, and writing and playing music in the studio.

Then, in a massive twist, he spends another year playing music in stadiums around Europe and the U.S., all the while being ripped off by his agent: a moment given all of three minutes of screen time.

It’s possible that even this time in his life, which appeared to possibly be a mix of both fun and poignancy, could have been engaging and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, most audiences will never know because 70% of this film is utterly unintelligible, and the 30% that is isn’t contiguous but consists of broken bits of randomly understood words or phrases swallowed up in hyper-realistic Jamaican accents.

Ultimately, where the narrative falls flattest (assuming that I was able to get this gist of things from what I could understand) is that Bob Marley’s music didn’t change anything. It didn’t end war or poverty. It didn’t enhance the prosperity of anyone (writ large) outside of Marley’s financial circle. It certainly didn’t change Jamaica’s geopolitics. Yet the film pulls a muscle, trying to convince the audience otherwise.

Perhaps the best way to sum up the movie is with that of its closing vignette. As Marley makes his triumphant return to Jamaica in order to play a “unity” concert, the film ends with a series of title cards, one of which says something to the effect that “in a symbolic show of unity, Marley brought Jamaica’s two bitter and violent political rivals together on stage.” Then we see actual footage of the event in which these two miserable-looking politicians are uncomfortably pulled together to join hands over Marley’s head. He then voices a meaningless platitude, and we fade to black.

Of course, nothing changed after that. The two politicians couldn’t get off stage and away from one another fast enough, and in the two years between this moment and an election that ushered in an era of global-scale drug smuggling, nearly a thousand people were murdered amidst the political conflicts.

Trying to make meaningless things meaningful isn’t a great recipe for engrossing cinema. Combine that with incomprehensible dialogue and a rather boring 3/4 of a film, and you’re better off parking you and your special someone on the couch and watching a little-known classic like Somewhere In Time for Valentine’s Day.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Rastafari

• The Rastafari religion is an always heretical, sometimes racist Abrahamic faith that believes that Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled Ethiopia between 1930 and 1945, was the second coming of Christ.
  • The religion gets the bulk of the narrative’s goodwill. It isn’t just treated as something Marley believed in but is revered in the film.
    • So much so that an important narrative refrain that haunts Marley throughout his life, ***SPOILER*** a dream about his white colonial father on horseback chasing him through burning sugarcane fields, is transformed into Black Jesus to take Marley to Heaven to symbolize that he has been able to find peace. ***END SPOILER***
    • In another scene that does nothing to further the story in any way, a stoned-out-of-his-mind Rastafari leader makes certain to disdainfully remind Marley and the audience that their “god is not a white man with blond hair and blue eyes. [Their] god is Black.”
      • This is said with full venom, and the scene ends.

Oh Golly, Gee

• There’s a mostly intelligible joke made at a white guy’s expense; the only thing that is understandable is “white boy” and their laughter at him.
• Another white guy is shown to be a complete stiff for comedic purposes.
  • He can’t understand what Marley and his band are saying, and they laugh at him…but guess what? Ain’t nobody understand him.

Aye Be Rabadaba Non-Deybadoo Colonization

• Something, something, conquering. Britain bad – something, something, colonization.
  • Maybe this was a legitimate argument, or maybe it was woke nonsense; after all, the Brits left Jamaica the year Marley was born, but who can tell? Half of the movie is unintelligable.

The post Bob Marley: One Love first appeared on Worth it or Woke.