Marisa Abela is good enough to make you stop checking her against the real thing, and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film is too fond of everyone in it to tell her story. A soft-lit romance where a hard life should be; watch it for her.
Sam Taylor-Johnson and her writer Matt Greenhalgh have made a film about Amy Winehouse that runs 122 minutes and has decided, early and firmly, that it is a love story. The first half hour sets out the household: a sing-song in the front room, Cynthia (Lesley Manville) at the piano, Mitch (Eddie Marsan) beaming, Amy (Marisa Abela) taking the high line and meaning it. Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan) turns up with a car and a contract, and the songs start arriving. Then Blake (Jack O’Connell) puts a coin in a jukebox in a Camden pub, and the film has found what it wants to be about.
Abela is the reason to be here, and she is a real reason. She does not do an impression, or not for long. The walk is there, and the sideways look, and the way of making a compliment sound like a challenge, but after ten minutes we stopped measuring her against the footage and simply watched a person. The singing is her own, and while it does not have the low, heavy pull of the records, it is never embarrassing, which in a film like this is most of the battle. When she stands in a small club and gets a crowd to go quiet, we believed the crowd.
We were moved, more than we had planned to be, by the scenes in her Nan’s kitchen. Manville plays Cynthia as a woman who has been glamorous and knows it, and who watches her granddaughter with a mixture of pride and something colder, as if she can see where this goes. There is a shot of the two of them at a table with a pot of tea, not saying much, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis let a single line of strings sit under it and go no further. It is the quietest thing in the film and the truest.
The craft around the edges is careful. Polly Morgan lights Camden in a warm amber that makes even the wet pavements look kind, and Sarah Greenwood’s flats and pubs have the right clutter: ashtrays, a pool table, a mattress on the floor. PC Williams’s costumes track the change from jeans and vests to the beehive and the little dresses without ever making a point of it. Martin Walsh cuts the years as a set of jumps, and the songs act as chapter headings, so that every stretch of the life is there to explain a lyric.
That is also the problem. Greenhalgh’s script keeps stopping to show us where a line came from, a row here, a name on a wall there, and the effect is of a very expensive footnote. Nothing in the writing is interested in how she worked, who she listened to, or what a studio day was like; the music happens to her, like weather. And the film is remarkably gentle with the men. Marsan’s Mitch is a worried dad and nothing more. O’Connell is charming, and it is easy to see the pull, but the script never asks him a hard question, and it is not much harder on her. Everyone here is doing their best. That is a comfortable view of a life that did not end comfortably.
The second half goes where you know it goes, and takes turns we will not describe, but we can say that the tone barely darkens with the material. Morgan keeps the amber, the strings stay soft, and the flashbulbs outside the flat are shot as spectacle rather than assault. By then we were restless, and then we were irritated at being restless, because the actress in the middle of it was working hard and the film kept looking away from her.
Greenhalgh wrote Control, which managed a musician’s short, bad life in 122 minutes without flinching, and Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy found a real edge in a young John Lennon. Set beside those, this is the gentler, safer film, and beside Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy it is a brochure. The reviews so far have been rough, and we understand why, though we think they undersell what Abela and Manville do in a kitchen.
See it if you want two hours in the company of a very good performance and can forgive the film around it. If you want to understand what happened to Amy Winehouse, the documentary is still there, and it is not afraid of the answer.
