If you’re not able to do the voice, you shouldn’t bother making the film.
In Respect, a conventional veering toward cliched biopic about Aretha Franklin, Jennifer Hudson gets as close to the Queen of Soul’s fearless vocals as possible. When Franklin sang, it was as if she had her powerhouse voice on a leash; the thrill was always in hearing how far she would let it run loose before yanking it back. Hudson, who did all of her own singing live on set, captures that quality as well as anyone probably could.
And so the musical sequences are the movie’s strengths—particularly those that emphasize the process of songcraft. There’s a wonderful scene depicting one of Franklin’s first recordings with the legendary session musicians at the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. After a few wrong turns, she declares, “Follow me,” and leads them into just the right groove for “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” Another session captures how Franklin and her sisters worked to beautifully meld their voices on “Ain’t No Way” (written by her sister Carolyn Franklin). Such scenes honor not only Franklin’s voice, but the way she made even others’ songs (such as Otis Redding’s “Respect”) completely her own, all while serving double duty as bandleader.
Making her feature directing debut, Liesl Tommy manages individual moments better than the film’s expansive narrative arc. There is a lovely transitional shot that begins on a teen Franklin (Skye Dakota Turner) singing in church; the camera floats away from her, seemingly buoyed by her notes, and when it returns we see Franklin as an adult. But most of the rest of the transitions are jarring, dropping us abruptly into major moments in her life—early battles with her controlling father (Forest Whitaker); her romance and eventual marriage to her abusive manager (Marlon Wayans); her alcohol-soaked years as a disastrous diva—without much warning, let alone any sort of elegant cohesion. Like many biopics, Respect takes on too much, skipping like a stone over a life that clearly had deeper wells to explore.
The film also concludes somewhat abruptly, dramatizing the 1972 recording at Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church of her live album, Amazing Grace. Respect positions it as a moment of redemptive triumph, a tidy lead-in to the hagiographic montage with which the movie concludes. But anyone who’s seen the actual documentary made from the event (also titled Amazing Grace) knows that the Aretha at the front of that church was more a mixture of regret, repression, resolve, and abiding faith. We get some great music in Respect, but only a surface sense of the rest.