It would be a challenging undertaking for any filmmaker to attempt to represent the outsize talent, unique style and utterly devastating downfall of soul singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse in biopic form. It's a thankless task for any actor too. To quote one of Winehouse's most poignant ballads, the endeavor is “a losing game” before it even starts.
Abela, who does her own singing and miraculously captures the vintage jazz style and timbre of Winehouse's undeniable vocal talent, delivers a fully committed performance. But the film itself is a shallow portrait, a recounting of gossipy facts and lore about Winehouse and her troubled relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (an admittedly fantastic Jack O'Connell).
This is not the first time that Taylor-Johnson has cinematically flattened a hyper-controversial story that was originally caked in gore and forced media consumers to question our own relationship to a kind of dark voyeurism. She adapted the James Frey rehab “memoir” “A Million Little Pieces” to similarly sanitized ends in 2019, sanding off the rough edges and failing to ask any of the hard questions. Why tackle these complex stories if you're just going to reduce them to easily digestible pablum?
