Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Liesl Tommy
Screenplay by Tracey Scott Wilson
Story by Callie Khouri

2021, now on Amazon Prime, DVD and Blu-ray

CAST
Jennifer Hudson – Aretha Franklin
Skye Dakota Turner- Young Aretha
Forest Whitaker- C.L. Franklin, her father
Marlon Wayans – Ted White, first husband
Tituss Burgess- James Cleveland
Audra McDonald- Barbara, her mother
Marc Maron – Jerry Wexler
Heather Headley – Clara Ward, her father’s partner
Kimberley Scott – Mama Franklin, her grandmother
Hailey Kilgore – Carolyn Franklin
Saycon Senfbloh – Erma Franklin
LeRoy McClain – Cecil Franklin, her brother
Albert Jones – Ken Cunningham, second husband
Tate Donovan – John Hammond
Myk Watford – Rick Hall
Cilbery Glenn Brown – Martin Luther King
Mary J. Blige- Dinah Washington
Joe Knevich- Tom Dowd
John Giorgio- Chips Moman
Shaun Schneider – Charlie Chalmers
Zach Strum – David Hood
Alec Barnes – Jimmy Johnson
Beau Scheler- Joe Arnold
David Simpson – Spooner Oldham
Joshua Mikel- Roger Hawkins
Henry Riggs- Tommy Coghill

This was mooted as a film ten years before it was made. Jennifer Hudson was Aretha Franklin’s choice to play her in this biopic. Aretha Franklin had seen her in Dream Girls then on stage in The Color Purple. The singing ability was essential, and this rivals Beyoncé’s phenomenal portrayal of Etta James in Cadillac Records. I was waiting for this to come out, and I hadn’t noticed it on Amazon Prime until now. I was expecting it to be one of Amazon’s new high price structure for streaming, like The Duke and Cyrano (£15.99), but it’s free. If you don’t have Prime, Amazon are selling the DVD for £6.99. We watched it and ordered a copy. Plus a copy of the soundtrack CD. So yes, we loved it.

Biopics need a powerful story, and wisely the plot just runs to 1972 and the album and attempted film of Amazing Grace. Aretha Franklin was said to be a prickly character, inclined to fly into a rage if addressed by her first name, and someone who stood very much on her diva dignity as the Queen of Soul. This brings it all into perspective. It’s brutally honest. She doesn’t come across as a nice person, though you can see why she wouldn’t be.

Jennifer Hudson looks the part throughout. She sounds the part. She can do the sullen bits, the bitchy bits (she derides her sister Erma’s ‘one hit’ even though that song, Piece of My Heart, would be on my best soul songs ever list), she can do the violent bits, the drunken bits, the religious fervour bits, the unattractive bits. She inhabits the role so strongly that a few minutes after she appears, she just IS Aretha.

The life story starts in Detroit, when she’s ten and her mother dies of a heart attack. Here she’s played by Skye Dakota Turner. Her parents were separated, and unlike her sisters, Carolyn and Erma, she had erased all memory of her parents’ violent rows.

She was African-American church aristocracy. Her preacher father, C.L. Franklin was paid a small fortune for his preaching tours. The house guests included Dr Martin Luther King, Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke, and half the Motown artists roster. C.L. Franklin was a major figure in the Civil Rights movement. He was a charismatic preacher … Forest Whitaker as C.L. Franklin preaches flat out as if to raise the dead. Tellingly, as one character says to Aretha, Ray Charles said he never had as much sex as when he was doing gospel tours. Aretha was abused … now we’d simply say raped … by a house guest when she was eleven. After the trauma, she was an elective mute for weeks until she was persuaded to sing in church by James (Tituss Burgess).

She had a child at age twelve (they miss that birth and jump from the singing in church scene, to age eighteen, when she already had two children). She kept the paedophile father’s identity secret until her will was opened in 2019. Incredibly, he fathered her second child three years later, so we have to say the ultra devout Baptist home was not a protective environment. It’s never mentioned why it was never a subject for discussion.

Her father got her a meeting with John Hammond at Columbia Records, though Sam Cooke wanted her to sign to his label, RCA. In spite of being in Detroit, it’s clear that Franklin Senior did not even consider the local and secular Tamla Motown label, though they are shown as house guests. Hammond also discovered Bob Dylan, but Columbia were the antithesis of a rock label, and she was made to sing things like Ac-cent-tchuate The Positive. In the film, she keeps emphasising that she wanted a hit, but in fact the Columbia albums did reasonably well and she was doing lucrative tours.

She made bad choices, marrying the violently abusive Ted White, who then got his name as co-writer on her compositions. She says in the film that he did not contribute one word or one note to them.

After so many Columbia albums, she is signed by Jerry Wexler of Atlantic records, at last getting onto a soul label. Wexler had just discovered Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama, and decided to record her there. Muscle Shoals Studios was newly acquired by the rhythm section (Johnson, Beckett, Hood, Hawkins). They had all been working for Rick Hall’s FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals. At FAME, the four had played on hit after hit for Atlantic Records from When A Man Loves A Woman to Sweet Soul Music. Add songwriters and players, Spooner Oldham and Chips Moman.

Ted White got into a major argument with studio boss Rick Hall, and made her leave. The recording I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Loved You) was released anyway and became a hit.

Culturally, this is the key moment in the film, and I’m going to talk about it aside. As the film shows, Aretha’s family are in a cultural bubble. They’re heavily involved in Civil Rights. They don’t mix with white people. Aretha is wary. Ted White is downright hostile. Aretha had toured the South with her father, but either it was Civil Rights events or Baptist church. US race relations are thin ice for a white British male. I toured with a white colleague from Mississippi who told me that he grew up in the era of forcibly integrated schools. He said that he grew up playing with black kids, and hanging out together as teenagers, but when he was in New York City he would be lectured on race relations and Southern bigotry by New Yorkers, who would then wipe the cutlery the black server had just placed on the table with a napkin. I visited Chicago many times in the 90s, and Michel Jordan’s restaurant was a favourite. We were aware of a wary distancing from African-American servers, in a way we had never noticed in Evanston, the academic suburb a few miles away. No one was unpleasant, but no one was friendly either, and we found that ‘keeping a distance mood’ from African-Americans often in Chicago, and some parts of New York, in a way we had never noticed in Florida or California. Then it was so different in the South. We drove into Oxford, Mississippi from Memphis, and cars were parked in the square, nose in, around the centre. I parked, and an African-American police officer strolled over. Being British your eyes always go to the gun. Being a stranger, you wonder if you’ve just broken some esoteric local driving or parking regulation. But no, he’d noticed our Tennessee license plates and just wanted to welcome us to town. He noticed the British accents, and we stood and chatted for ten minutes while he gave us the lowdown on restaurants. Relaxed, friendly, no sign of any wariness or distancing. We found that again and again in Tennessee and Mississippi. African-Americans were curious about our accents (they thought Karen sounded like Princess Diana) and they initiated the friendly conversations. Maybe being obviously British we just fell outside the system. Who knows?

Which takes us to Muscle Shoals, and the players on some of the best soul records ever, who happened to be white. They’d played with Atlantic’s black soul stars. Aretha communicated with them pretty soon because they had music in common. Ted White was aggressive, and deeply unpleasant. The way the scene with Rick Hall is played showed another reason why Aretha tended to stay apart. Ted has beaten her in a hotel lobby and it gets into the newspapers.

Then there’s the title song. I’ve written on Sophie’s Choices in music (in the book and film, Sophie has to choose which child the Gestapo will kill), and Respect is my prime example. Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin? Every time I hear Aretha’s version, I’m transported to a small upstairs disco club in Bournemouth, where a friend (a friend who was female, rather than a girlfriend) used to annoy the DJ by requesting Aretha’s Respect every twenty minutes or so. I can see her dancing to it now, hands in the air, hips shaking, totally obsessed by the song. The film shows Aretha getting into the Otis song at home, then working on her very different take with her sisters. ‘Ree … Ree … Respect‘ … ‘Ree’ is what her family call her. It follows a major argument with Ted White. She means the lyrics. The importance of the backing singers is strong. And on the choice, nine days out of ten, I’d choose the Otis Redding version, but not right after seeing the film.

She dumps Ted, she takes up with Ken, her tour manager. Success comes. She is the Queen of Soul, but then alcohol and drugs intervene, and we get a brilliantly executed ‘bad concert’ when her sisters more or less do the song while she stumbles about and falls off the stage. After that, she clears the house of alcohol.

Finally, she decides it’s back to the roots, and a pure gospel recording in a church, which she will produce with James (Titus Burgess) on piano. The album, Amazing Grace, was her biggest US seller. The proposed film didn’t work out, as sound and picture didn’t synch and it was abandoned to fester in Atlantic’s vault. When technology had advanced to the point where it could be synched in the 2000s, she refused to allow release, and sued to prevent release. Her family decided to allow posthumous release in 2019. I’m going to order it.

That’s it. The film ends, as every “based on a true story” film of the last few years ends with footage of the REAL Aretha, near the end of her life singing Natural Woman in front of an emotional Carole King, who wrote it, and Barack Obama. This is accompanied by text on her many awards between 1972 and 2018, when she died. Last we have Jennifer Hudson singing her own composition Here I Am (Singing My Way Home).

There’s nothing on her illustrious career with Clive Davis’s Arista label, or her later collaborations with George Michael and Keith Richard. They don’t mention her version of The Weight which she never wanted to record.

It all rests on Jennifer Hudson’s terrific interpretation of Aretha and of her songs.