A smarter person than I said that prestige music biopics are superhero movies for boomers, and it’s a fine point. Like the Marvel or DC franchises, they’re marketing a familiar brand to an enthusiastic audience, which eagerly laps up what is, in essence, the same movie countless times over, working from a tightly constructed and unwavering structure. Superhero films give us the establishing iconography, the thrilling midpoint action beat, the plot twists and rising stakes, and the final, flavorless CGI-laden battle sequence. Prestige biopics give us the humble beginnings, the rise to success, the revelry in fame and fortune, the inevitable fall (usually aided by substance abuse), and the triumphant recovery, ending with the on-screen text of the subsequent achievements, and archival footage and photos of the real people (lest we’ve forgotten that this was ALL TRUE).
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In both cases, far more attention is paid to pre-release hype than the final product – we’re inundated with casting announcements, surreptitious on-set photos of our stars in costume and make-up (wow, she looks so much like her!), and featurettes spotlighting remarkable “transformations” of one kind of another. And the films themselves seem less interested in crafting a self-contained narrative than in (literally) playing the hits; in organizing themselves around moments their audience expects and awaits, they become a kind of fan service. None of this is to say that such films can’t have their own pleasures: a well-crafted scene or two, a heartfelt performance, some funny lines. But these perks are so trapped within the scaffolding of the Product that they almost exist despite their surroundings.
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To put it mildly, this idea is not dispelled by Liesl Tommy’s new Aretha Franklin portrait “Respect.” It tracks Franklin’s life from childhood (1952, to be precise) to the triumph of her “Amazing Grace” sessions in 1972. The choice not to attempt a cradle-to-grave biopic is admirable, but even twenty years is a lot of ground to cover in any depth over the course of a feature film; the strategy of “Respect,” as with most of these films, is to jettison the “in any depth” part.
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We first meet little “Ree” as a child (played by a terrific young actress named Skye Dakota Turner), as her preacher father, C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), wakes her up in the middle of the night. “They wanna hear you sing,” he tells her. “You wanna sing?”
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“Yes, please,” she replies and wanders downstairs to one of her father’s “Saturday night parties,” where religious and show-biz types mix, drink and raise hell. Little Ree blows them all away, singing and swaying and snapping in her nightgown, and she similarly knocks out the parishioners at her father’s church. But it’s not all singing and dancing for little Ree – her parents are divorced, rare for that time, and their strained relationship is finished entirely when her mother (Audra McDonald) dies before Aretha’s tenth birthday. Of course, before she goes, mama must impart the life lesson that will recur throughout the story: “If you ever don’t want to sing, don’t… Your daddy doesn’t own your voice. NO man does.”
Aretha grows up, and the role is taken over by our star, Jennifer Hudson. The first half of “Respect” focuses on her search for her voice and style as an artist, the second, on trying to find her voice as a person. It’s a decent enough organizing principle, but Tracey Scott Wilson’s screenplay has a deathly case of “Tell, Not Show”; Franklin states, over and over, that she “needs hits” and that the standards she’s recording for Columbia “aren’t me,” but after all that talk, she simply goes to record at Muscle Shoals, and that’s… pretty much it.
The personal material in the back half jumps haphazardly and often monotonously, from peace to conflict and back again. The pieces don’t even fit together; much is made in her public statement of support for Angela Davis, so when her management team calls her for a worried conference in the next scene, we assume it’s to deal with the fallout of that announcement. But no, it turns out they’re canceling shows because of heretofore unseen issues (the Davis thread is never brought up again): exhaustion, prickliness, and, yes, alcoholism. Suddenly, “Respect” is an addiction movie, and a totally overwrought one, with Hudson weeping on her floor, surrounded by empty bottles, making like Chris Rock in “New Jack City.”
“Respect” isn’t a total washout. The music, needless to say, is great; as with “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” the contemporary templates of the subgenre, the best single sequence shows us how a great song (“Never Loved a Man,” in this case) is built, dramatizing the alchemy, the straight-up magic, of making a timeless work of art. (On the other hand, a scene of Aretha up in the middle of the night, rearranging the title song with her sisters in a fit of inspiration, feels too good to be true.)
Wilson’s script finds its best moments when grappling with the interpersonal dynamics. The complicated relationship between Franklin and her father, who is emotionally and sometimes physically abusive, repeats itself with her first husband, Ted (Marlon Wayans), burrowing into a complex intersection of emotion, business, and codependency. The chemistry between Hudson and Wayans is white-hot, and it has to be – suggests, none too subtly, that much of their relationship was primarily about sexual desire.
Hudson fares well. In the songs (which she, of course, performs herself), she sounds both like Aretha and herself, and her acting similarly bypasses impersonation; she’s allowed, thankfully, to play Aretha as a character. But there’s not much of a character to play – the script gives her precious little to work with, rendering her reactive and inactive for too much of the running time. The supporting cast is mostly effective (though we must ask, once again, what the hell Forest Whitaker is doing with his voice), with Marc Maron bringing his considerable comic energy to the role of Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, Tituss Burgess gracefully bearing the burden of explicitly stating the picture’s themes, and Mary J. Blige coming on a like a thunderbolt – she’s messy and funny and, most importantly, unpredictable.
But director Tommy and screenwriter Wilson, both of whom are making their feature debuts after a good bit of television work, seem lost. The pacing is disorientingly punchy (at one point I checked my watch, thinking they seemed to be wrapping up, and discovered there was an hour to go), and their storytelling gimmicks mostly miss; Franklin’s teenage pregnancies are treated, rather creepily, like some mystery box, but handled so obliquely that you’ll have to Google afterward for a straight answer.
Their primary problems, however, are typical of the filmed biopic. “Respect” suffers from the condition wherein each scene has to contain so much information that every line of dialogue becomes an exposition dump, or worse; one out-of-nowhere scene finds Aretha and her father mouth-piecing the conflicting perspectives of the civil rights movement, spouting what feel like position papers. The visual storytelling is seldom more sophisticated; when Aretha finally lets Ted go for good, we first see a portrait of the couple in her apartment, followed by her throwing things in big trash bags. Then, as she calls to her doorman to come pick up her trash, the camera lingers on that same photo, poking out of the bag. YES, WE GET IT.
I’ve often marveled that anyone can still make a musical biopic after “Walk Hard” so thoroughly skewered them with such ruthless precision; it’s even more shocking to see filmmakers still partaking of the exact same tropes satirized there. When Blige is first seen, her dialogue includes a reference to “Me, Dinah Washington,” and it’s the most “What do you think, George Harrison of The Beatles?” moment imaginable. And when the camerawork gets zonky, and the shadows crawl up the walls as Aretha weeps over her alcoholism, it takes a stronger soul than this one not to hear Dewey Cox despairing, “Goddamnit, this is a dark fuckin’ period!” Maybe you’ll have better luck. But there’s little in “Respect” that one couldn’t glean from a Wikipedia scan, and in terms of her work, time would be better-spent re-watching “Amazing Grace” or revisiting her albums. [C-]