Movie Review – The Hollywood Reporter

Aretha Franklin chose Jennifer Hudson to play her in a dramatic feature film based on her life, and Hudson repays that leap of faith by honoring the late singer’s towering legacy in Respect. A powerful tale of self-actualization spanning 20 years of training, Liesl Tommy’s biopic is also an intimate gift of love, rich in complexity, spirituality, black pride, and feminist guts rooted not in didactic speeches but in authentic experience. . The ageless music, of course, is the galvanizing force, but it’s the personal struggle behind it that makes the story so touching.

A respected South African theater and television director who confidently embarks on feature films, Tommy is no exception to bio-drama conventions, but she infuses every scene with an authentic feeling that elevates the material – as much as the powerful. Hudson pipes opened in song. This is by far the star’s most convincing screen performance since Dream girls, living not only in musical interludes but also in the often combative interactions with those closest to Aretha. The beating heart of MGM / UA’s entertaining release, combined with Franklin’s multigenerational fan base, should ensure a receptive audience following its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.

More focused on his calendar than the recent anthology season of Nat Geo Genius: Aretha, with Cynthia Erivo, Respect begins with his preteen years in Detroit in 1952 and ends with his live church recording of the gospel album, amazing Grace, two decades later. Playwright Tracey Scott Wilson’s screenplay traces the initially faltering rise to fame as expected, but it pays equal attention to Darkness, Family, and Church, three foundational elements that went a long way in shaping Franklin as an artist.

What sets the story apart from most musical biopics is the fact that Aretha (played as a child by Skye Dakota Turner) was directly exposed from a young age to influential artists counted as family friends. Among them were Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington, the latter playing with the fiery leadership of Mary J. Blige in a pivotal scene of brutally outspoken mentoring. A child prodigy, Aretha was regularly dragged out of bed by her Baptist pastor father, the Rev. CL Franklin (Forest Whitaker), to sing at night parties full of sophisticated guests. “She’s 10, but her voice is going to be 30, honey,” one of them said.

While her parents separated early in her life due to CL’s volatile and volatile temperament, her mother Barbara (Audra McDonald), who was also an accomplished singer, was a major inspiration. In a gorgeous scene on a weekend visit, McDonald’s wraps his heavenly voice around “I’ll see you” as mother and daughter catch up at the piano. But the shock of Barbara’s sudden death threatens to silence Aretha. The closeness to her sisters, Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) and Erma (Saycon Sengbloh), is described as another source of anchoring of female solidarity, a buffer against CL’s expectations of patriarchal appeasement.

By the time the central role shifts amid Turner’s song to Hudson, Aretha is already a mass of contradictions. Having performed as a soloist both at her father’s church and on the Baptist touring circuit, she has the balance and command to sing in front of huge audiences. And her father’s friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), a man she knows as “Uncle Martin,” feeds her desire for social justice. But CL is still hyper-controlling – of her participation in civil rights protests, of her career choices, even of her love life. This last element is complicated by her refusal to name the father of her two children, the first born when she was not yet 13 years old, a trauma that haunts her throughout.

Her years of recording at Columbia in the early 1960s resulted in a series of albums but no success as she tried to make her mark as a jazz artist. When she finally breaks with her father’s iron grip, it’s with another domineering man, Ted White (Marlon Wayans), a charmer who becomes her husband and manager. The first to trust Aretha’s infallible instincts regarding her sound was producer Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron, formidable); once he transferred it to Atlantic Records and put it in a studio in Alabama with the band Muscle Shoals, the hits start to happen.

A scene in which Aretha takes over the recording of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” and reshapes an ordinary song into a raw emotional statement demonstrates her brilliant intuition as a self-taught musician. Likewise thrilling is a late night jam at the piano with her sisters singing in accompaniment, during which she takes up the song by Otis Redding that gives the film its title and makes it the supercharged hit that would come to define it.

These musical interludes and their glimpses of the process by which a great song finds its characteristic form are extremely edifying. Hudson’s voice is electrifying, sticking to the model but not so much that it restricts imitation. Another highlight is “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” performed on stage in Detroit after Dr. King presented Aretha with an honor for her contribution to raising funds for the civil rights movement. Likewise, his heartbreaking delivery of King’s favorite anthem, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” at his funeral.

Where the film begins to get bogged down a bit, making its duration felt over 2 hours, is in the unwinding of Aretha’s marriage as Ted becomes more abusive, in part in response to his growing role. more marginal in his career. It is perhaps a touch on the nose to see Aretha’s emancipation epiphany come up with the chorus “Freedom” as she sings “Think” at the Olympia in Paris. But the song still reigns.

The storytelling loses some fluidity in the later sections after Aretha begins a relationship with tour director Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones). Despite the stability of finally being with a man who supports him emotionally, his heavy drinking begins to cause friction with his family, including falling out with his sisters. But it almost comes out of nowhere, like an afterthought of filmmakers suddenly remembering to reveal some character flaws for balance.

Wilson’s script spends too little time on the thread, relying on vague nods to Aretha’s demons – both personal and political, in the wake of the MLK assassination and the Arrest of Angela Davis by the FBI in 1970. There is an episodic and chaotic quality to developments such as Aretha skipping concert dates and appearing drunk on stage, with disastrous results in a show in Georgia.

It’s a credit to both the filmmakers and Hudson, however, that the film stands up to these shaky passages and never loses our investment in the woman he so clearly venerates – a character drawn both as larger than life and fragile. In closing with the recording of amazing Grace at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles was a wise choice, serving to tie together several narrative threads, as well as tie the story to music inseparable from the black experience in America.

The recording project reconnects Aretha with an important figure from her childhood, James Cleveland (Tituss Burgess), the former music director of her father’s church; this allows him to assert himself with the controversial but affable Wexler for Creative Control; and that brings her back to the cleansing music she grew up on, thereby healing family divisions. Anyone who isn’t moved by the pain and passion of the Hudson channels in the album’s title track has to be made of stone. He growls from her like silent thunder.

Along with his star turn, Whitaker does a remarkable job as a charismatic preacher, a proud and difficult man capable of harshness as much as love, while Wayans effectively plays Ted as gentle and handsome but ultimately weak. Tommy’s ability with actors is evident in the warmth and vitality she derives from even the smallest of female roles, including Kilgore and Sengbloh as Aretha’s sisters, McDonald as her beloved mother, Kimberly Scott as her salt of the earth grandmother and Heather Headley as CL’s longtime lover, singer Clara Ward. Turner, fresh out of her Broadway debut playing another music legend as a child in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, brings a touching wide-eyed innocence and a thick voice inversely proportional to young Aretha.

The film has an attractive sparkle thanks to Kramer Morganthau’s crisp cinematography and the lush details and bold colors of Ina Mayhew’s mid-century production design. But the most striking element is Clint Ramos’ costumes, including a series of fabulous dresses and statement jewelry showing the styles of black women of the time at their most glamorous. The musical production of Stephen Bray and Jason Michael Webb is also top notch. The end credits roll out a litany of awards and honors Franklin has received on images and photographs of her over the decades, which will move the hearts of anyone who has ever cherished her music. Respect give the queen of soul the royal treatment she deserves.