Respect (BRON Studios, Creative Media Finance, MGM, United Artists, Universal, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been wanting to see since it first came out earlier this year: Respect, a biopic of Aretha Franklin directed by Liesl Tommy (a woman who’s mostly worked on TV – notably on The Walking Dead, AMC’s modern-dress zombie series – and has no other feature-film credits) from a script by Callie Khouri and Tracey Scott Wilson. There’s another Aretha Franklin biopic floating around out there, made for a streaming service and starring Cynthia Erivo as Aretha, but this one more or less had the imprimatur of official status. Supposedly, a month before her death Aretha Franklin met with Jennifer Hudson and told her that if anyone ever made a movie of her life, she’d like Hudson to play her – and it’s a measure of how limited the opportunities for Black women in films still are that it’s taken 15 years since Hudson’s star-making turn in the film Dreamgirls for her to get another role fully worthy of her talents. Respect is the sort of movie that’s good as it stands but could have been a great deal better; in a laudable attempt to avoid the Jazz Singer clichés that were virtually inevitable in a film with this basic story – a clergyman’s offspring forsakes the music of his/her dad’s church and makes it as a star in popular music – writers Khouri and Wilson and director Tommy fell into another set and turned the film essentially into a Black version of the 1955 tear-jerker biopic of white singer Lillian Roth, I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

It also didn’t help that Tommy and her cinematographer, Kramer Morgenthau, shot the whole film in the murky past-is-brown look that’s become Hollywood’s default look for just about everything. As I’ve written before in connection with even better reality-based Black films like Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the past-is-brown look is hard enough to take in a film in which the principles are white and it’s even more annoying when the principals are Black: their brown faces blend all too readily into the murky brown backgrounds and it’s often hard to pick them out. Also the script bears little more than a casual relationship to the facts of Aretha’s life: it’s true that I’ve never read a biography of her and so I don’t know whether her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (pastor of the largest and most influential church in Detroit and the best-selling artist on Chicago’s Chess Records even though he didn’t sing or play an instrument: his records were merely recordings of his sermons), was living with another woman he wasn’t married to after Aretha’s mother left the family, or whether Aretha had a bout with alcoholism at the height of her career in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that nearly incapacitated her, and she intended her return-to-gospel album Amazing Grace (1972) as a prayer of thanks to God for getting her off the booze the way John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964 as a thank-you letter to God for giving him the strength to get off alcohol and heroin.

But the parts of this story I do know about are told in this movie so far from how they actually happened I have little trust that Khouri and Wilson are giving us the real story of the parts I don’t. In this movie Aretha is sexually molested at age 10 in the middle of a party at her father’s house at which several illustrious soul singers, including Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke, are present; a man at the party sneaks into Aretha’s bedroom, asks if she has a boyfriend, and when she says no he asks her, “Would you like me to be your boyfriend?.” and without her having a chance either to say no or get the hell out of there, he closes the bedroom door behind them and … According to Khouri and Wilson, this is Aretha’s “Rosebud” moment: she never tells anyone (her mom – or at least the mother figure who’s living with her dad and functioning as such – notices something is wrong with her and tries to pry the secret out of her, but without success) but she periodically withdraws into near-catatonic fugue states during which she won’t even speak, much less sing, and these continue to afflict her even as she eventually becomes a superstar and brings soul music to the white masses worldwide.

I find it virtually impossible to believe such an influential and highly regarded Black minister as Rev. C. L. Franklin could have sustained a relationship with a woman he wasn’t married to, and given what I’ve read about the antagonism between the gospel and R&B audiences (though to us white people gospel and soul may sound awfully similar, they appealed to two dramatically different audiences and lovers of gospel music generally rejected R&B and soul and refused to listen to them; I’ve often told the story that a month before he died, Sam Cooke tried to sit in with his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and was literally booed off the stage with catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!”) it’s hard to believe that Rev. Franklin would have even allowed R&B and soul records to be played in his home, much less invited singers in those styles to his home. (At the same time, if Khouri and Wilson had accurately depicted this dividing line between gospel and soul in the script, this film would have seemed like even more of a ripoff of The Jazz Singer than it does.) The film doesn’t mention that Aretha Franklin cut her first album, a gospel record, for Chess in 1956 at age 14 – Rev. C. L. Franklin was Chess’s biggest-selling artist (moving more records than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf!) and when he told the Chess brothers he wanted his 14-year-old daughter Aretha to record a gospel album, they let him – but they did the album on the cheap. Instead of getting her into a studio and recording her properly, they just clipped her songs from the recordings they’d made of Rev. Franklin’s services to create the best-selling albums of Rev. Franklin’s sermons. Still, this is the first Aretha Franklin album – made four years before she launched her career as a secular soul singer at Columbia Records, where she was signed by the legendary producer John Hammond.

It’s not clear from the movie exactly how Hammond discovered her – it was on a demo he’d received from songwriter Curtis Lewis, who had recruited Aretha to sing a song he’d written called “Today I Sing the Blues” – or what sort of music Hammond wanted from her. The script for Respect makes it seem like Hammond produced all her Columbia records, but he didn’t: at a loss for what to do with her, Columbia recruited Clyde Otis (one of the first Black producers to work for a major white label) from Mercury, where he’d masterminded Dinah Washington’s rise from Black star to crossover superstar with her 1959 record “What a Difference a Day Made.” During her five years at Columbia Aretha worked with various producers, sometimes singing soul versions of 1920’s songs like Dinah had (the one Columbia record with Aretha that even nosed into the pop charts was her unlikely cover of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” a record that’s been ridiculed by generations of writers who’ve never heard it – it’s actually pretty good), sometimes attempting jazz (Hammond had reportedly heard her as the next Billie Holiday – who had died just one year before Aretha signed with Columbia) and sometimes edging towards the kind of searing soul that would eventually launch her career into superstar orbit when she switched labels from Columbia to Atlantic in 1967.

In his autobiography Hammond was resentful about the way his bosses at Columbia took control of Aretha’s career and recruited other producers to make her records there – and every nasty thing he’d said about how he could have made Aretha a star in 1961 if he’d stayed in control of her records was confirmed when in the early 1980’s Columbia released a compilation of Aretha’s records there called Aretha Sings the Blues, in which they presented 13 songs that showed Aretha groping towards her later style and then one, “Maybe I’m a Fool,” in which she achieves it. The only song on the compilation actually produced by John Hammond, “Maybe I’m a Fool” is as good as anything Aretha cut for Atlantic – a searing gospel-rooted vocal, hammering piano triplets (by Ray Bryant, whom Hammond recruited as her accompanist because he, too, had had roots in the Black church), and even a lyric surprisingly similar to her first Atlantic hit, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” another one of those blues laments in which the singer tells us that her man is a creep but she loves him anyway. (Don’t believe me when I say “Maybe I’m a Fool” was Aretha’s first masterpiece? Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjWrFgQ1Vs.)

The film also rather oddly portrays the relationship between Aretha and her great predecessor, Dinah Washington. Dinah is played by Mary J. Blige (who wouldn’t be bad casting for a Dinah Washington biopic) and appears in two scenes, in one of which she gets upset that the 10-year-old Aretha sings a jazz novelty at one of Rev. Franklin’s parties and Dinah announces she was planning to record the song herself; and a later scene at the Village Vanguard nightclub in New York in which Aretha acknowledges that Dinah is in the audience and goes into a version of one of Dinah’s greatest songs, “This Bitter Earth” – and Dinah angrily turns over the table she’s sitting at and chews Aretha out for doing one of her songs in her presence. The film doesn’t mention that Dinah Washington died of a prescription drug overdose in December 1963 – which, ironically, benefited Aretha’s career by eliminating her principal competition. As long as Dinah was alive Aretha would have been only “another Black girl who sings like Dinah Washington.” Once Dinah died, Aretha was her natural successor – even though it took three more years and a change of record labels to bring Aretha the stardom she deserved. In February, 1964 – just two months after Dinah’s death – Columbia recorded Aretha in an album of Dinah’s songs called Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, and though Dinah had been billed as “Queen of the Blues” and Aretha as “Queen of Soul,” there’s definitely an air about this album of “The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.”

The film depicts both Hammond (Tate Donovan) and Aretha’s producer at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron), as the usual music-industry assholes – though there’s a nice scene in which Rev. Franklin shows up at one of Hammond’s sessions with Aretha and apologizes for her bad behavior. Hammond says he worked with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and they gave him a lot more trouble than Aretha did, and Rev. Franklin fires back, “Aretha didn’t grow up in a whorehouse like they did.” There are also other annoying deviations from the known facts in this film; in the movie Aretha recruits her sisters Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Halley KIlgore) as her backup singers – Aretha’s real backup singers on her early Atlantic records were a vocal trio called the Sweet Inspirations (one of whom, Cissy Houston, was Whitney Houston’s mother) whom she recorded and toured with until Elvis Presley lured them away because he could pay them more. And of course, being the lead character in a biopic about a woman singer, the men in her life are monsters: Ted White (Marlon Wayans) is shown as an egomaniac wife beater, and the man she finally leaves him for, Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones), isn’t much better.

Not surprisingly, Respect comes most searingly to life when Jennifer Hudson as Aretha is shown actually making music; though her voice doesn’t have quite the edge and power of Aretha’s own, Hudson is one of our very best living woman soul singers (when I wrote a long obituary on Aretha’s death I named her, along with Jill Scott and the gospel singer Mandisa, as the three singers who seem to me to be carrying forward Aretha’s legacy) and she’s certainly appropriate casting. But the I’ll Cry Tomorrow turn the plot takes gets to be a bit much – while the fictional Aretha is shown turning up bombed for a concert date in Europe and collapsing on stage, the real Aretha was performing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and making an incandescent live album that’s one of the highlights of her career. Respect is full of great moments that deserved a better movie – like the scene in which Aretha shows up at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to make her first Atlantic single and notices that all the musicians are white. “Don’t they have any Negroes who play music around here?” she says (and for all the criticism I’ve been leveled at Khouri and Wilson for their script, at least they get that right and use the word “Negro,” which was historically accurate, instead of “Black,” which came later), and Jerry Wexler notices the look of distaste she gives them at having been dragged all the way to Alabama to record with a bunch of Southern white boys with Southern white-boy racial attitudes. “Percy Sledge had that same look on his face – until he heard these boys play,” Wexler says. Later Aretha is shown working out her rewrite of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” with her sisters, who take their childhood nickname for her, “Ree,” and use it as the basis of the backing vocals – and the result is such an electrifying transformation of the song few people today identify it with anyone but Aretha. (It was Aretha, not Redding, who wrote the spectacular chorus that became an anthem of feminist empowerment: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB.”)

The film also does an O.K. job of depicting Aretha’s relationship to the civil rights movement, including her friendship with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown, who does an acceptable turn in the nearly impossible task of playing someone whose actual looks and voice are so much a part of the public record), her increasing militancy (Aretha and her father have the debate between nonviolence and harsher forms of resistance a lot of Black people were having in the late 1960’s, and she publicly supports Angela Davis and records a cover of Nina Simone’s anthem of Black pride, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”) and the shock she and her family felt when King was killed, as if they’d lost one of their own. But once again Khouri and Wilson can’t resist tweaking an already good story: they have Aretha sing King’s favorite song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” at King’s funeral – which she didn’t. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (who’d been onstage behind King at the 1963 March on Washington and had seen he was bombing with a dull historical lecture; she got in his ear and told him, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!,” which he famously did) sang “Precious Lord” at King’s funeral – and Aretha sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral four years later. The writers build the recording of the Amazing Grace album into an appropriately uplifting finish (though even there they slip up – when she tells her father that he taught her all the songs she;’s going to sing, I couldn’t resist saying, “Except Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholly Holy,’ which I learned from his album What’s Going On; and Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ which she learned from her album Tapestry”) for a movie that’s magnificent in parts but also frustrating in parts, containing a stirring performance by Jennifer Hudson but marred by a script that ran roughshod over Aretha’s real life.