Liesl Tommy (2021)
Liesl Tommy and Tracey Scott Wilson have plenty of theatre and television experience but Respect is the first cinema feature that Tommy has directed and for which Wilson has written the screenplay. It shows – in both cases – in this overlong (145 minutes) Aretha Franklin biopic, starring Jennifer Hudson. I’ve been watching films for approaching sixty years but am still hazy on the balance of power in the cutting-room – I guess it varies. In this case, might the result have been better if the experienced film editor (Avril Beukes) had had more of the whip hand than the novice director? As it is, Respect is, to put it kindly, even paced and the cast often seems to be acting and reacting for longer than necessary. (I’m afraid the occasional moments of domestic violence are almost a relief: they briefly quicken the tempo.) Callie Khouri, an Oscar-winner for Thelma and Louise who’s not written much for cinema in the thirty years since, shares with Tracey Scott Wilson the ‘story’ part of the writing credit but the IMDb crew list doesn’t include a script editor. Tommy and Wilson badly needed one.
The narrative begins in 1952, when Aretha Franklin was ten, and ends in 1972, with the recording of her celebrated gospel album Amazing Grace. This covers only about a quarter of Franklin’s seventy-six -year life yet the lacklustre storytelling gives Respect the feel of one of those old-time biopics that dutifully plotted, and plodded, from cradle to grave. The film is scrupulous in supplying the detail of things the viewer may not need to know – announcing on the screen exactly when and where sequences are taking place – and clear as mud in some more important respects. Liesl Tommy’s discretion in how little she shows of encounters whereby Aretha was a mother of two at the age of fourteen, is welcome. Other elisions feel like pussyfooting – as if the notoriously controlling Franklin (see note on Amazing Grace) were still around to object to warts and all.
You get the message that Aretha’s parents’ marriage wasn’t happy but the womanising of her Baptist pastor father C L Franklin (Forest Whitaker) is glossed over, so that he seems a self-important bore but not a moral hypocrite. In the opening scene, he wakes little Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) with an instruction to come down and perform to a gathering at the family home in Detroit. (He sends her back to bed once she’s done her party piece.) Dinah Washington (Mary J Blige) explains to another of the guests that the child is ten (but sings like a thirty-year-old). Her mother Barbara died shortly before Aretha’s tenth birthday: when we see the two of them together subsequent to the party, is Aretha already fantasising that warmly maternal Barbara (Audra McDonald) is still alive? C L Franklin calls the shots in his daughter’s personal and professional life until his place is taken by another domineering male. Ted White (Marlon Wayans), to her father’s fury, becomes Aretha’s husband and manager. As the former, White has a tendency to be physically abusive towards his wife. He seems a hopeless manager, too: you wonder how accurate this is or if it’s just an easy way for Tommy and Wilson to show White as a thoroughly bad lot. The real Aretha Franklin had a lengthy struggle with alcoholism. In Respect, her drink dependency arrives out of nowhere circa 1970. It’s as if the film-makers wanted to soft-pedal this also – then suddenly realised that a biopic diva must hit rock bottom in order to rise to triumph at the eleventh hour.
Respect conveys well enough the ubiquity of music in Aretha’s upbringing, in her father’s church and at home (Barbara Siggers Franklin was a talented pianist and vocalist). The film’s weak, though, when it comes to creating textural distinctions between the different stages of the heroine’s musical progress. The production values for the church performances, when the teenage Aretha accompanies her celebrity-preacher father on his speaking tours, are too plush and Jennifer Hudson, who enters the picture at this point, is ill served by this. Aretha Franklin gave her blessing to Hudson’s becoming her representative on screen but Respect has been a long time in the works and its star turned forty this month. Hudson doesn’t look too old for the part throughout but she doesn’t come close to credibility as the seventeen-year-old Aretha, and her too-well-groomed look compounds the problem.
Hudson goes on to give a good performance, though. It comes as no surprise that her singing is stronger than her adequate but careful acting; more striking is that her acting is better when she’s singing. There’s a good sequence in a studio, as Aretha gets to grips with ‘Ain’t No Way’, a composition by her younger sister Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore). You get a sense here of the protagonist’s performing intelligence and imagination. Although events around the death of Martin Luther King (Gilbert Glenn Brown), a family friend, are lamely staged, there’s real poignancy in Aretha’s singing at MLK’s funeral. It’s exasperating that Hudson’s formidable voice is never allowed to perform a song in its entirety – though you’re grateful that the concluding recording of ‘Amazing Grace’, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is no exception. A single verse of the hymn seems to last ten minutes.
The heavy-handed direction also means that, like everyone else, Hudson is sometimes exposed as playing too deliberately. This is a bigger issue with Forest Whitaker (his Oscar-winning days also feel very distant on the strength of this), Marlon Wayans and Albert Jones, as the tour manager who becomes Aretha’s lover and the father of her fourth child (she also had a child with Ted White). Marc Maron, as the veteran record producer Jerry Wexler, is just about the only exception to the sluggish acting. He gets some rhythm and changes of pace into his delivery.
Respect‘s ending is doubly unfortunate. According to biopic convention, Liesl Tommy puts on the screen summarising legends followed by archive footage of the film’s subject to accompany the credits. Each legend refers to the achievements of ‘Ms Franklin’. Although this may be meant to pick up her request, in an early scene with Jerry Wexler, that he call her not by her forename but ‘Miss Franklin’, Tommy’s form of address seems ridiculous, an expression less of respect than of obsequiousness. (Repeating the ‘Miss’ wouldn’t have been so bad.) As I’ve noted ad nauseam, signing off with film of the real thing – especially in biopics of musical performers – does no favours to the impersonating actor we’ve been watching. By choosing a clip of a seventy-something Franklin performing ‘(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman’, Tommy might seem to avoid the problem since Respect’s narrative ends when Aretha is only thirty. In fact, because it’s so unusual to see and hear the elderly Aretha Franklin and she’s still in astonishing voice, the archive material’s impact is all the stronger – all the more obliterative of the work of gifted, conscientious Jennifer Hudson.
15 September 2021
