ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: Love is the drug that really felled tragic Amy ... trends now
Back To Black, the Amy Winehouse biopic, has been released to a cacophony of criticism. You can take your pick of the objections.
Marisa Abela doesn't sing as well as Amy (of course she doesn't); the portrayal of Amy's junkie husband Blake Fielder-Civil is too kind; her cab driver father Mitch is too likeable – and so it goes on with everyone having their tuppence worth of memory.
I saw an early screening and very much enjoyed the film, especially Marisa's touching performance as Amy, once described as a 'North London Jewish girl with tons of attitude'.
A girl full of life and mischief with the powerful voice of a New York torch singer.
Although there are points to quibble at, critics have missed the central point and strength of director Sam Taylor-Johnson's film. It captures very powerfully what it is like as a young woman to fall fatally, hopelessly, in love with the wrong person.
Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse, alongside Jack O'Connell as Amy's junkie husband Blake Fielder-Civil
Amy Winehouse became one of the most famous singers of her time but she was also a girl in her 20s who got swept up in a catastrophic love affair. Love was the drug that did her in, not the alcohol or narcotics.
Fielder-Civil was a scuzzy character and Jack O'Connell's casting is too wholesome for the pallid, heroin needle-thin guy he was in reality. But that's the person Winehouse fell for.
Heaven knows, there are many of us who, at some point, have made bad decisions in love. We've been captivated by characters that all our friends and family knew were a bad idea. But did we listen? Did we care about their opinion? Who knows what it was about Fielder-Civil that utterly demolished Amy when he left her to return to his previous girlfriend, but not so demolished her that she couldn't create sublime music. 'You go back to her and I go back to black,' as she wrote in the title song.
Marisa's portrayal of the highs and lows of that relationship is compellingly convincing.
You feel her in thrall, both physically and emotionally, to him, and her absolute agony when he abandons her.
Biopics won't ever tell the full story of a person's life – they compress and shape in order to make a narrative work. And as we've seen in The Crown, the closer they are in time to the subject's life, the more open they are to criticism that
