Take Care TCB

I mainly wanted to watch Respect (2021) to hear Jennifer Hudson do Aretha Franklin.

It starts with Aretha as a little girl. Her father, Forest Whitaker, is throwing a party, and he wakes her up to come down and sing for the people. Although he's a minister, this is a hot party, with dancing, drinking, some gay hand-holding, Dinah Washington (Mary J. Blige), etc. And the song she sings isn't a gospel tune, but a hoochy number. 

We also see her at her mother, estranged from her dad. With her mom, she does sing gospel - and also gets the warning that she doesn't have to do whatever her father tells her, even if she loves to sing. But her mom soon dies in a car crash, and Aretha goes silent. She is also molested by someone from one of her dad's parties, and refuses to name the man. But she does start singing again in church.

Then we have grown up Aretha, meeting a dangerous man - Marlon Wayans as a manager. To keep her away from him, Whitaker introduces her to producer John Hammond (Tate Donovan). Hammond had discovered everyone from Billy Holliday to Bruce Springsteen, but he was a little square for Aretha. He produced her singing orchestrated jazz standards, and was getting good material, but no hits.

She's now marries to Wayans, and he does at least one good thing - gets her signed with Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron). Wexler took her down to Muscle Shoals, where she and Wayans are surprised to find that the session men are mostly white. We had seen all this in the Muscle Shoals documentary. They even made the motel Aretha was staying at look authentic.

There's a similar thong with Aretha's gospel comeback album, which was made into a documentary. The film looked a lot like that, and Hudson's Amazing Grace was quite amazing. They left out the Rolling Stones standing in the back, though.

The story has its ups and down - a lot of Aretha's life was good, but she did not live a trouble-free life. Hudson plays her a little close to the vest, as if her childhood silence infected the rest of her life. But there are two things about Aretha that the movie gets right: Her insistence on respect and living her life her own way, and her transcendently beautiful singing. Hudson seems to be capable of handling that as well.