Respect (2021)

Film: Respect (2021)

Stars: Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess, Mary J. Blige

Director: Liesl Tommy

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In the past twenty years, no genre (for my money) has gotten more tired than the musical biopic.  Everyone from Ray Charles to Elton John have gotten the prestige treatment, and I get the rationale.  These are people everyone knows, with songs that they can easily exploit on the big-screen, and the movies make money.  Bohemian Rhapsody was the most successful example of this, getting a Best Picture nomination and a Fort Knox-style box office to match.  But the genre is stale, always going to the same formula with increasingly diminishing returns.  That's unfortunately the case for Respect, which is elevated by Jennifer Hudson's vocals, but an overlong story (one far too familiar) keeps an anchor around its neck the entire film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on the early life of Aretha Franklin (Hudson).  Franklin is an interesting figure because while she's a titan, she also grew up in a prominent family in Detroit, where her father CL Franklin (Whitaker) was a well-known minister who cavorted with the politically famous (he was a friend of Martin Luther King. Jr.), and the musical alike (we see Mary J. Blige play Dinah Washington in two key scenes).  We get to see Franklin's troubled upbringing, where she had a son as early as twelve, and her struggles to make it into the music scene (all of her early records before partnering with Jerry Wexler were flops).  As the film is a musical biopic, we get a lot of time devoted to Franklin's strained marriage to songwriter Ted White (Wayans) and her later battles with alcohol.  The movie ends with her returning to her gospel roots, recording Amazing Grace, which would become the bestselling disc of Franklin's career.

Clocking in at over two hours, the film is repetitive & too long.  The film does document some of the more shocking chapters about Franklin's life, some of which might not be known to casual fans (specifically her early pregnancies), but the movie feels too predictable.  It spans only part of Franklin's life, and maybe it should've focused on a more interesting chapter?  After all, Franklin's most atypical career moves likely happened in the 1980's, when she was battling Tina Turner both in terms of getting big hits (Franklin's "Freeway of Love" going against Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It?" for billboard supremacy), but also cementing her legacy-would she exclusively be a big hit from the 1970's, or would she have lasting power into the coming decades, particularly with Turner going for her title?  In some ways, both were true, but it's a more interesting "comeback" angle than what we get in Respect, which is a story we've heard countless times & is filmed conventionally.

Hudson's acting style is not a fit for the growing changes in Franklin's personality.  Whether it's her inability to keep up with the growing diva antics of the character, or her being too close to Franklin personally, she holds back when she should be going full throttle, making the character more complicated.  Her performance doesn't work, which is strange because she seems to understand Franklin when she sings.  This was a criticism that was levied at her for her Effie White, but I don't think it fits to the same degree, as Effie White as-written worked with Hudson's approach (only knowing how to communicate through song).  Aretha Franklin the character (and let's be real, Franklin in real life), was someone who didn't struggle to bring her voice in her later years, her public facade coming through in most interviews-there's not enough evolution here, and it places an anchor around the film.  But I have to give Hudson credit-unlike, say, Rami Malek, not only does she actually sing here, but she uses her vocals to create a connection to the audience that she simply cannot achieve in the rest of the picture.