Respect

For every one movie like Rocketman, the biopic about Elton John that told his story through his music and elaborate imagination sequences, while at the same time being honest and open about his personal struggles, we seem to get 10 or so films just like Respect, which takes a noted performer (in this case, Aretha Franklin), and then molds her life story into a flat and lifeless filmed Wikipedia article.  Franklin's life has been stripped of all complexity here, and instead becomes a cliched "Behind the Music" story.

Jennifer Hudson has been tasked with playing Aretha Franklin, and she is definitely more than up to the challenge.  She naturally excels at recreating her hit songs in the recording studio and the concert scenes.  Everything else about the movie, however, doesn't work, because it feels like we've seen it all before.  Like Ray Charles (Ray), Freddie Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody), and Tupac Shakur (All Eyez on Me) before her, the movie hits all the obvious and predictable pit stops that come with the Hollywood biopic story.  There is the stern parental figure, there is the abusive spouse, and of course, there is the subject of the film's subject matter falling into addictions, nearly destroying their life and their career as their friends and family look on with great concern.  The famed entertainer hits rock bottom, manages to pull themselves up, and then records an inspiring number which closes the film.  You've seen this film before, and Respect offers no reasons as to why to sit through it again.  Yes, Hudson is great here, but not great enough to watch a movie where she's the only thing that stands out.  

We first meet Aretha at the age of 9 (played by Skye Dakota Turner), already gifted with a great singing voice, and performing at a church where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), preaches.  The movie touches on the fact that her father was highly respected, and had many famous friends, such as Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige) and even Martin Luther King, Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), but this comes across as more of an afterthought throughout the film.  It will occasionally bring up that through most of her life, Aretha was an activist who was very interested in civil rights, but these feel like pit stops instead of actual character building, and her relationship with Dr. King is never really explored in any detail, which might have made for a more interesting movie.  What the film is interested in, however, is making Aretha's father into another heavy-handed authority figure who seems to always appear in these movies.  In case you don't pick up on where the movie is headed, one of the first times we see him in the movie, it actually cuts to a close up to the alcoholic drink in his hand.  I'm sure it took a real superhuman effort on the part of the filmmakers not to add a dramatic music cue to this shot as well.

Respect also frequently seems held back by its PG-13 rating, especially during an early scene where it is implied that Aretha was raped when she was 12-years-old by a family friend, and became pregnant.  Again, this is never given the emotional weight it should have, as the film cannot really go into much depth without bumping up the rating.  We do get a powerful and disturbing image of a young Aretha with a full-term pregnant belly, but the film kind of glosses over it afterward.  Instead, the movie is more interested in following the "demons" that haunted Aretha her entire life, starting with the death of her mother (Broadway veteran Audra MacDonald, woefully underused here) right before her 10th birthday.  These personal demons are further aided by her physically abusive first husband, Ted White (Marlon Wayans),family disputes, and her eventual dive into substance abuse and alcohol.

The movie clearly wants to tell the story of how Aretha found her voice, and became the acclaimed performer that she was.  We see how she was signed early on to a deal with Columbia Record's John Hammond (Tate Donovan), and while she put out multiple albums for the label, they were not successful, because she was only singing the music that he wanted her to.  She eventually signs onto another label, gets to create her own music, and rises to superstar status.  Again, this is handled in the most superficial and obvious of ways, complete with overused montages with different album covers flash across the screen.  By the time she's deep into drinking and falls off the stage in a stupor while giving a concert, the movie feels like it's just hitting the perfunctory notes.

No matter how good Hudson is as Aretha Franklin (and she's quite good here), the movie simply never rises to her level.  It never truly comes to life, and simply seems like an assembly of cliches from other movies about famous singers.  This is a movie that wants to tell us how Aretha survived her personal struggles, when it should be about how her voice inspired people, and the part she played in the civil rights movement.  There are brief moments throughout that hint at this approach, but it is never acted upon.  The film's director is Liesl Tommy, a Tony-nominted stage director making her filmmaking debut.  She seems to want to play it safe here, giving us a garden-variety biopic that wants to be uplifting, but is simply uninspired.

Respect had the potential to be so much more, but instead it follows the path that a lot of other mediocre to failed biopics have followed, and simply ends up joining them.  Hudson might get another Oscar nomination out of this, but I doubt this film will leave much of an impression except on the most hardcore of the real life singer's fans.

0 comments