The Media Tourist

Jennifer Hudson Gives the Queen of Soul a Righteously Royal Salute

Respect
Starring Jennifer Hudson, Forrest Whitaker, Mark Maron & Marlon Wayans
Directed by Liesl Tommy
PG-13
In theaters Aug. 13, 2021

If anyone deserves respect, it’s the Queen of Soul, a singing superstar who earned 18 Grammys, had 20 No. R&B singles, sold 75 million records and became the first female ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Aretha Franklin gets the appropriate royal treatment in this rousingly righteous biopic starring another singing superstar, Jennifer Hudson, as the prodigiously gifted Detroit preacher’s daughter who became a global musical sensation in the 1960s and ‘70s. We see how the talent of young Aretha (portrayed impressively as a child by young Skye Dakota Turner, who also played the pint-size version of another iconic crooner, Tina Turner, on Broadway) was nurtured by her divorced parents, her music-loving father (Forrest Whitaker) as well as her songbird mother (Broadway’s award-winning Audra McDonald).

We see that she grew up in an upper-middle-class world swirling with music and celebrities. Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), one of the most popular and successful Black entertainers of the 1950s, was a close family friend. Black gospel pioneer James Cleveland (Tituss Burgess) gives Aretha music lessons. Motown crooner Smokey Robinson (Lodric Collins) drops by her dad’s backyard cookouts.

We also see the heartbreak, loss and trauma that scarred little Aretha, creating lingering “demons” that resurfaced into her adulthood. Franklin’s life was complex, complicated and messy, and Respect doesn’t shy away from the mess.

First-time feature-film director Liesl Tommy—whose previous work has been in TV and stage—deftly handles episodes of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, and addresses the rifts and ruffles in families, friendships and business caused by jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, alcohol and infidelity.

Respect pours plenty of biographical and chronological detail onto the screen and weaves them into its story, using songs as signposts and superimposing years and placenames, like “Detroit,” “Paris,” “New York City” and “Muscle Shoals, Alabama,” to keep us oriented as we march through more than three decades of Aretha’s event-filled life.

We watch her singing as a teenager at rallies for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), where her early activism was stoked into a fiery lifelong passion. We watch her floundering fledgling efforts at recording, where her first, jazzy albums were flops—until she switches labels and begins working with upstart R&B producer Jerry Wexler (Mark Maron), who helps her find her soulful mojo with hits like “Think,” “Chain of Fool,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Respect.”

We watch her troubled relationship with her first husband/manager, Ted White (a terrific Marlon Wayans), whose mercurial temper gives her painful musical inspiration, but ultimately dooms their marriage.

And importantly, the movie also takes us to church, emphasizing how much gospel music formed the foundation of Franklin’s musical DNA. As she grows from a little girl into a woman, she never forgets something her mother tells her: that her voice belongs to God.

We see and hear many of Aretha’s greatest, mightiest milestone hits, and some of her lesser ones, and learn how they came to be. We watch her singing in her home, in nightclubs, in the studio, in concert halls, where adoring fans throw roses at her feet…and in church. There are bits of a lot of songs, pieces of many others, and full-on performances of at least a couple, including an electrifying closing with “Amazing Grace” that will make you a hands-in-the-air believer—at least a believer in the profound gifts of Jennifer Hudson, the former American Idol finalist and Grammy winner who was hand-picked by Franklin, who died in 2018, for the role.

Hudson, who won an Oscar for her supporting role in Dreamgirls, reaches new heights—and emotional depths—as Franklin, singing “live” for all the filmed performances (no lip-synching) and conveying the often-tortuous terrain Franklin walked for most of her life, from dealing with her domineering father to her abusive, gaslighting husband, and navigating a career as a Black female in a music career controlled by white men, even ones that meant well.

At a performance of Respect, Aretha throws shade at her no-good lout of a man in the wings, then gives a nod of solidarity to her backup singers, including her two younger sisters (Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh), when she gets to the song’s refrain of “Freedom!” We know that she knows how loaded that word is, that it’s more than just a word. It’s a rallying cry, an R&B power punch of female empowerment and emancipation, in a song that would become a civil rights anthem and her own enduring musical signature.

The fashions—which span the ‘50s to the late ‘70s—are fab. The music is majestic, with much attention to detail; recording sessions where we observe the almost organic process by which crack studio musicians create a song tapestry, on the spot, for instance, or as we eavesdrop while Franklin, noodling at 3 a.m. on her piano with her sisters, comes up with the vocal hooks and stacked harmonies for Respect: “Re, re, re, re…” “Just a little bit…” “Find out what it means to me…”

“Do your thing,” one of her sisters encourages her earlier, during a time when Franklin is doubting her musical direction, unsure of what kind of music she should make or the type of songs she should sing. “And do it as big and as loud as long as you can.”

Franklin is gone, but her music lives on, and this tuneful tribute is a ringing, right-on reminder of her legacy that stokes the flame for a new age, lifting her story loud and long and strong. And Hudson’s moving, monumental performance channels the power, the spunk and the very spitfire spirt of Aretha herself.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, indeed. And more than just a little bit. A lot.

Hauntingly beautiful pre-life proposal might make you look at things differently

Nine Days
Starring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong & Tony Hale
Directed by Edison Oda
Rated R
How to Watch: In theaters Aug. 6, 2021

A lot of people wonder what happens after we die. But do you think much about what happens before we’re born?

That’s the premise of this fantastical fable, an existential gem of a film in which a reclusive metaphysical middle manager interviews a group of new souls for a shot at the big show: real life.

The souls (including Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, Arianna Ortiz and Zazie Beetz) all look like fully formed adults, but they’re only a few days—or minutes, or hours—old. That’s how it is, here in the pre-life world.  

As the interviewer, Will (Winston Duke), puts them through a gauntlet of tests, trials and open-ended moral-ethical questions, he’s looking to fill a recently vacated slot in the real world—a young female violinist who died in an unfortunate accident. The candidates have nine days to prove themselves worthy of the position. Only one will be chosen, and that’s Will’s job.   

“You are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life,” he tells them. “If after this process, you are selected, you will have the chance to be born in a fruitful environment where you can grow, develop and accomplish.”

“Are you the boss?” Hale’s character asks him.

“I would say a cog in the wheel,” says Will.

We never learn much—anything, really—about that wheel, the bigger scheme of things outside the little isolated “house” where Will operates. It’s in the middle of a vast desert (the movie was filmed in Utah), and inside is a wall of old-school televisions and monitors. That’s where Will and his assistant, Kyo (Benedict Wong), who drops by every day, watch the real-world lives unfolding of all the previous candidates Will has successfully “placed.” He takes copious notes about what happens to them, good or bad, and he dresses up for their weddings, recitals and other life-event celebrations—as if he’s attending, too. Sometimes Kyo brings flowers.

Will records and catalogues everything on VHS tapes, stores all his notes in a room packed with metal file cabinets, and photographs candidates with a Polaroid camera. Will’s pre-life world appears, for some reason, to be stuck in the low-tech early 1980s.

The candidate souls all buckle down for their nine-day assignments. Hale (from TV’s Veep and Arrested Development) plays Alexander, who always finds something funny in everything. Beetz, from TV’s Atlanta and a supporting standout in Joker, is Emma, whose fascination with Will unsettles him, forcing him to confront his own troubled past—a past in which a recitation of Walt Whitman’s epic poem, “Song of Myself,” was pivotal. And it’s interesting to see Skarsgård, best known as the evil clown Pennywise in the terrifying It movies, in a much less threatening role. 

Brazilian-American writer-director Edison Oda, whose background is mostly in advertising and short films, makes a smashingly impressive feature debut, filling it with lovely cinematic touches and coaxing graceful, sometimes powerful performances from his cast. Duke, a physically impressive actor who played a fierce warrior in Black Panther and the bumbling dad in Us, grounds the movie in Will’s melancholy mysteries; he becomes an imposing metaphor for the many unknowable things about life itself.

“Maybe there’s another parallel dimension,” Kyo says to Will. Perhaps the two of them are being “watched by someone else, who’s being watched by someone else, who’s being watched by someone else. It’s deep, isn’t it?”

It is, indeed. The movie isn’t interested in making any big statements about spirituality or religion; it’s broader and more mystical and—yes—deeper than that, with more questions than answers. It wants to make you think, to ponder, to wonder. The number nine, of course, is packed with symbolism: cats with nine lives, human pregnancies that last nine months, the numeral nine and its mathematical “magic.” In a Tarot deck, the ninth card is the Hermit—like Will, living alone in the desert.

The movie, which sometimes seems like a stage play given feature-film treatment, probably won’t be for everyone. The drama is slow-moving and somewhat static; nothing moves fast, no one gets into a brawl and there’s no blood, explosions, fights, shocks or scares. By most mainstream movie standards, some viewers might chalk it up as a bit of a snooze.

But this desert drama has a haunting, unique beauty, a strange but alluring spin on what might be just beyond—or come before—the veil of our human existence; it feels like a bracing shot of Twilight Zone in a retro martini glass, with a chaser of Disney-Pixar’s Soul, only with considerably more bite and grown-up grit, and a lot less whimsy. This beguiling peek into a strange corner of another “world” invites you to look at life, and reality itself, through a prism of alternative out-there possibilities.

As the candidates go through their testing, they learn about life, and living, from watching people on Will’s TVs. They learn about—and long to experience—little “real world” things, like bicycle rides, the feeling of being on a beach, eating a peach, relishing a beer or sharing a laugh over jokes with friends around a dinner table. They learn that life is made up of those little things, those moments that become lifetimes of memories.

“What is it like, to be alive?” Beetz’s candidate asks Will.

“Maybe you’ll find out,” he answers her. Maybe we all will, if we haven’t already.

You may not think much about where you came from, how you got here or what might have gone on before you popped out, into the world. But maybe someone like Will was watching you all along, and maybe he picked some soul—like Zazie Beetz or Tony Hale or Bill Skarsgård—who worked hard for days, expressly for the opportunity to be “you.”

Crazy? Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

No matter what you believe, Nine Days makes you think that getting here, being alive and feeling the full spectrum of being human, is no trivial thing. Life is precious; souls long for it, compete for it. So, ponder that—especially the next time you bite into a peach, feel the sand of a beach between your toes, or the wind on your face as you ride a bike, or laugh with your friends.

And say hi to Will, somewhere out there.