Summary
This straight arrow of a biopic ticks off all the major choruses in the Queen of Soul’s career, but leaves out some major verses along the way.
There’s many indicators of a legendary music career. If you’re lucky you’ll have a hit single or two, impressive chart rankings, accolades and performances before the highest offices in the land. Yet the real mark of success is a Hollywood biopic. In the case of filmmaker Liesl Tommy’s RESPECT, no less a subject that the Queen of Soul gets the feature treatment.
Opening in Detroit, 1952 with a pre-teen Franklin, we’re introduced to the future star as a young performer. Her father C.L. Franklin (Forrest Whittaker) is a Baptist Minister and Civil Rights advocate, fond of throwing parties for his influential and talented circle of friends. Aretha is regularly trotted out to sing for the group and it’s heavily implied she is taken advantage of by the older men.
The film then skips to Franklin in her late teens, the mother of several children while trying to break into the music industry. It’s the first of several things that the film glosses over as it jumps through the decades. Loosely painting the performer as both ambitious and insanely talented, she’s also cast as a victim of her father’s domineering ways, and later her abusive first husband Ted White (Marlon Wayons). Rattling through hits like the titular ‘Respect’, ‘Natural Woman’ and ‘Think’, screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson’s cinematic path through her career is the one of least resistance.
Unquestionably one of the greatest musical performers of the last century, Franklin’s story has been told in a handful of other screen outings. Recently played by Cynthia Erivo in the third season of Genius, and featured in a number of documentaries, RESPECT still follows the Bohemian Rhapsody model of simply ticking off subheadings from an online encyclopedia entry. Songs are matched to key moments in her life (‘Think’ accompanies her separation from White, for example), while historic events such as the death of Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown) form the backdrop at other turning points.
Yet the music mostly remains the focus, and for this we can be grateful. While the development of these classic songs are only fleetingly seen — including the introduction of producer Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron in that familiar role he tends to play) — director Tommy gives some space for the showstoppers. Indeed, only Hudson could have played Franklin with this level of (amazing) grace. While few have the singing chops to go toe-to-toe with the Queen at her height, Hudson is a powerful performer that belts out the classics and commands dramatic moments in equal measure.
Building up to Franklin’s historic 1972 live album Amazing Grace, seen at length in the excellent 2018 documentary film, it ends on a high note as selective as any greatest hits package. While we can only ever get part of the story in any biography, here’s a film that almost goes out of its way to remove any nuance from the story of this certified legend. It might TCB, but the Queen deserves a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Liesl Tommy | WRITER: Tracey Scott Wilson | CAST: Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess, Saycon Sengbloh, Hailey Kilgore, Skye Dakota Turner, Tate Donovan, Mary J. Blige | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal | RUNNING TIME: 145 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 13 August 2021 (USA), 19 August 2021 (AUS)
