Mark Reviews Movies: RESPECT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 13, 2021

The casting of Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin is the correct and, perhaps, only choice for this particular biography. It's likely that a good number of actors could play the Queen of Soul in Respect, with its broad and non-specific depiction of the singer's childhood and rise to the height of stardom—before she transcended the concept of a musical star to become a legend. Now, narrow that list to actresses who could play the role and also perform Franklin's songs with a similar level of skill, the same kind of passion, and the indescribable quality that separates the great singers from the otherworldly ones. Hudson is probably the only actor remaining.

She performs a good number of famous Franklin tunes in director Liesl Tommy's biographical movie, and Hudson sings those songs, sometimes at different stages of their creation (proving, as if it needed to be proved, that she's doing the singing), with such verve and melodic virtuosity that one almost wishes this had been a concert movie instead. In some ways, it almost is, considering how slim Tracey Scott Wilon's screenplay is in terms of narrative and how formulaic that narrative actually is. As for getting at the heart of the woman who was the late and forever great Queen of Soul, the movie barely gets started reaching for that quality of its story.

Singing and performance are on the movie's mind from the start, at least. We first meet a 10-year-old Aretha (played by Skye Dakota Turner), who's summoned from sleep by her preacher father Clarence (Forest Whitaker) to entertain his party guests. Surrounding her are the likes of Sam Cooke and Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), who will later give an older Aretha a scolding and a pep talk for covering one of her songs in front of her, but the young girl wows them all.

We also, though, get a quick sense of how thin and routine the drama of the movie is. Clarence lords over his daughter's life and not-yet-burgeoning career. Young Aretha yearns for the occasion of spending time with her mother Barbara (Audra McDonald), who's separated from Clarence and serenades her daughter at the girl's constant request. Everyone, except for decreasingly dear dad, wants Aretha to find her own voice and way, even the Reverend Dr. James Cleveland (Tituss Burgess), who sits the girl at the piano and tells Aretha that music will save her life.

Upon the death of the girl's mother, Clarence believes Aretha has been taken over by some kind of demon. Her silence is like the one that overcame her after an older man entered the girl's bedroom in the night, told her she was pretty, and shut the door behind him. Aretha never speaks of this, and Wilson clearly has no idea what to do with this information, except to use it as a way to explain the older Aretha's mood swings and later dependence on alcohol.

All of this is basically and—in the case of the direct suggestion that a young Aretha was repeatedly raped (A 17-year-old Aretha has two children)—rather uncomfortably just fodder for the behind-the-scenes, at-home personal drama that gets this narrative from one song to the next. The other major source of conflict is Ted White (Marlon Wayans), a friend of Clarence's friends, whom the older Aretha (played by Hudson) falls for, seemingly because her father hates him and his transparently hustling ways. As the years pass in montages of album covers, Ted becomes more controlling and physically abusive.

While the depiction of Aretha's personal life and private struggles sometimes comes discomfortingly close to exploitative, it's at least trying to explain something about the singer. That's something the professional side of the story never approaches, as a pair of very different record producers (Tate Donovan plays the one who's unaware of the talent he has hired, and Marc Maron plays the one who is fully aware) help her career, Ted tries slithering into her fame, and the story moves from location to location without any tangible sense of Aretha's rising success—aside from more montages of album covers and magazine covers.

The narrative here—combining a personal story that ends up feeling like melodrama and a professional one that feels like a rushed trip through an encyclopedia entry—definitely doesn't do Franklin, her life, or her career much justice. Thankfully, we have Hudson, who, when she isn't singing, is convincing enough in an underwritten role. When she is singing, though, Hudson's performance becomes a thing of mysterious beauty.

Hudson doesn't attempt to exactly imitate Franklin's singing, although there are notes, vibratos, and enunciations that are eerily identical. She's more about capturing the aura of the singer's voice, and in the many scenes where Hudson's Aretha sculpts a song in the studio or performs live on stage, we can see how accurately the actor captures the singer's presence and hear (and, with a good sound system, sometimes feel) how she has uncannily molded her voice to encompass Franklin's own.

This is a great performance in a movie that depends on but doesn't exactly deserve it. Little to nothing else about Respect comes close to Hudson's work here.

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