Saturday, April 13, 2024
CIVIL WAR*****
BACK TO BLACK****
Marisa Abella (Industry) delivers a stunning central performance as Amy Winehouse in this new biopic of the singer. She captures Amy's caustic wit, her physical mannerisms, and most impressively, her spoken and singing voice. Director Sam Taylor-Wood (NOWHERE BOY) tackles the audience's apprehension head on in an opening scene showing Winehouse's Jewish parental family singing together. Abela freestyles Fly Me To The Moon and the audience relaxes, safe in the knowledge that Abela's Amy is spot on. Her Amy is straightforward to the point of rudeness, full of energy and sheer talent. But also troubled way before she meets her much vilified husband Blake Fielder-Civil. She is already bulimic and alcohol dependent with a self-acknowledged streak of self-sabotage, particularly when it comes to men. This is something that Matt Greenhalgh's script, using her own lyrics, explores from the first scenes.
About forty minutes into the film, Amy's first album has been a breakout success but she has been told to restyle herself for America. This plays into all of the insecurities that have fed into her self-abuse. And at that moment we meet Jack O'Connell (UNBROKEN) as Blake Fielder-Civil. He is charming and fun and has a deep knowledge of music over which he and Amy can bond. It's another powerhouse performance. There's an immediate spark and we are swept up in young, heedless romance. According to this version of the story, it was a genuine love affair on both sides at first, and while he was already using Class A drugs she stuck "only" to alcohol and weed. It's only when they reunite after a break-up that he was motivated more by her fame and money and ability to fund his smack habit. Once inside prison, he cleans up and realises what's obvious to the rest of us - that this is a desperately toxic codependent relationship with competitive self-harm. He wants to break free. Fair enough. But it breaks Amy in the process.
Needless to say, this is a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of Fielder-Civil than we got from contemporary news reports, or from Asif Kapadia's superb 2015 documentary AMY. My only criticism of Kapadia is that he often creates pantomime villains in his films - whether Alain Prost in SENNA or Fielder-Civil and Mitch Winehouse in AMY. Greenhalgh and Taylor-Wood may have swung the pendulum back too far in BACK TO BLACK but I really appreciate the attempt to treat humans as flawed real people. And we have to remember that Fielder-Civil was also a young man and an addict at the time.
The whitewashing of Mitch Winehouse, played by the innately sympathetic Eddie Marsan, is probably going to be even more controversial. In this film, he is portrayed as an indulgent father who is totally out of his depth when it comes to Amy's addictions. This kind of tracks with Amy's mother saying, in Kapadia's documentary, that when Amy told them about her bulimia they just kind of ignored it and hoped it would pass. We don't see the avaricious exploitative father of Kapadia's doc at all.
But let's not be fooled into thinking this film is a whitewashing of the brutality of addiction and bulimia. Amy's descent into full blown class A drug addiction is shown explicitly, but never exploitatively. We see her ability to go clean for periods, but that she is, in the scripts words, always on edge, so that it doesn't take much to push her over. In this film, it's always heartbreak that does it - whether Fielder-Civil leaving her, or her inability to get pregnant and have the stable family life she craved. The narrative is convincing, and Abela's central performance is heartbreaking. I love that we spent so much time with Amy and her beloved Nan (Leslie Manville) and saw that Amy's heart was rooted in jazz. I felt I had an understanding of her deep familial musical heritage that I didn't get from Kapadia's doc. And this is, I think, one of the most important things that we need to know about her.
BACK TO BLACK is rated R and has a running time of 122 minutes. It went on release in the UK today and goes on release in the USA on May 17th.
Thursday, April 04, 2024
RIPLEY (TV)**
I absolutely adore Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. They are slippery and subversive and dark and dangerous and about the best crime procedurals you can read. I have also loved many of the iterations by which Ripley has found himself on the big screen, from PLEIN SOLEIL to RIPLEY'S GAME and Anthony Minghella's superlative TALENTED MR RIPLEY.
When I first heard that Andrew Scott (ALL OF US STRANGERS) was cast as Ripley I was excited but I assumed that this would be an adaptation of one of the later books when Ripley was older. I was shocked to discover that this was actually an adaptation of the source novel where the characters are meant to be in their twenties. Johnny Flynn's Dickie is also in his forties. The problem is that this makes the concept of the book seem ... well ... odd. Dickie Greenleaf dodging his responsibilities on a kind of extended gap year in Italy feels right for pretty young things but doesn't quite work for middle-aged men. And thanks to Zaillian's choice to go for black and white photography, life in Italy never feels beautiful and lush and seductive. Rather, we start off in a world that is decaying and deserted and rather drab. It's hard to see what in Dickie and Marge's existence would be attractive to Tom. Their life doesn't feel particularly luxurious. And there's no sexual tension between Dickie and Tom, and certainly no apparent love for Dickie on Marge's part. It's just all so flat.
As we move into the second act, things pick up pace. The crime procedural has its own momentum. Whether it needs five episodes though, is doubtful. We see the quality of Eliot Sumner as Freddie Miles in their pivotal scene with Tom. A scene that is played very differently to how Philip Seymour Hoffman played it, but with no less menace. The problem is that Eliot is a good fifteen years younger than Andrew Scott and seems to be in a totally different film.
So far so problematic, but where this adaptation totally loses it is in the final episode. We begin episode eight with a flashback to Caravaggio which is way too on the noise, and a clear case of a showrunner being given way too much running time to pad out. We also get a confrontation between the police inspector and Tom that's so literally incredible it destroyed any respect I had for this adaptation. Minghella's choice to have them never meet was the more elegant solution.
RIPLEY was released on Netflix today.