Whenever a new tent-pole blockbuster, usually of the Marvel or Star Wars variety, arrives to swallow popular culture, a certain segment of film critics and moviegoers respond with a collective sigh: Here we go again. But when it comes to “prestige pictures” of the film festival variety, a single genre, no less formulaic, dominates both multiplexes and the vaunted awards circuit – the biopic. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with portraying the life of a towering, real-life person. Good to great examples abound within a subgenre whose subjects are the demigods of music. Coal Miner’s Daughter, Amadeus and What’s Love Got to Do with It are early exemplars of the form. But the latter film, in particular, has provided the standard template for a subsequent slew of artist-approved, warts-and-all musical biopics that have garnered impressive box office receipts and a bevy of golden statuettes. What’s Love opened the floodgates for Ray, Walk the Line, Bohemian Rhapsody and the recent Rocketman. Now there’s Respect, a perfectly adequate biopic about Aretha Franklin, which recently premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. So: Here we go again.
Naturally, Jennifer Hudson stars as the adult Aretha. Even more than her Oscar-winning turn as Effie White in the 2006 adaptation of Dreamgirls, this is the role she was born to play. Indeed, Franklin herself tapped Hudson for the project way back in 2007. And as a recent New York Times profile notes, the two have similar biographies that include an early start singing in church as well as shared grief over the sudden death of family members. Respect covers this ground with painstaking detail, dramatizing Aretha’s rise from adolescent phenom to up-and-coming jazz singer, civil rights activist to pop hitmaker.
Though Tracey Scott Wilson’s tried-and-true screenplay isn’t pathbreaking, Respect remains a cut above your average biopic. This is largely thanks to admirable performances, striking mid-century production and costume designs and, of course, those immortal tunes. Hudson’s primary talent has always been that gigantic vocal instrument. But her dramatic range as an actress has grown considerably since Dreamgirls, not to mention (shudder) the first Sex and the City movie. The rest of the cast — which includes Forest Whitaker (as her overbearing father C.L. Franklin), Audra McDonald (as her mother Barbara Franklin), Marlon Wayans (as abusive husband/manager Ted White), Tituss Burgess (as the incomparable Reverend James Cleveland) and Marc Maron (the breakout here, as record producer Jerry Wexler) — is uniformly top notch.
This is South African-American director Liesl Tommy’s first feature film, having previously cut her teeth in the theater. It’s an impressive, if flawed debut. Clocking in at nearly two-and-a-half hours, Respect at once suffers from unnecessary bloat and the baffling omission of a key moment of triumph, when Franklin officially became the Queen of Soul thanks to her masterpiece, I’ve Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. The aftermath of that personal and artistic breakthrough is cruelly brushed aside with a yada-yada montage. The film’s finest moments, instead, zero in on music industry processes, on the writing and recording of her music, up to and including that monumental 1967 album. These scenes make it clear there was far more to Franklin’s brilliance than just the singular ability to transport an audience whenever she opened her mouth and wailed.
Wilson and Tommy are ultimately interested in covering the ups and downs of every biographic detail, rather than delving further into the how and what of their subject’s excellence. As such, Respect ends up feeling like an elevated combination of Aretha Franklin’s Wikipedia page and an episode of Behind the Music, particularly during its convoluted, get-it-all-in third act. In other words, it dutifully follows the well-trod narrative paths of lesser, middling biopics.
The film ends with Franklin returning to her roots in a Los Angeles church, for the live recording sessions that led to Amazing Grace, her biggest LP and the bestselling gospel album of all time. It’s a fitting bookend for Respect’s overstuffed story, but also an unfortunate reminder that the footage of those sessions already compose a richer, more rewarding Aretha Franklin film. The 2018 concert documentary Amazing Grace, currently streaming on Hulu, induces holy tremors and actual goosebumps throughout its brief runtime. By comparison, Respect’s multitudinous particulars, however lush in their execution, add up to more of the same, over and over again.
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