Respect

A musician's biography set in America. Aretha is a child. In her father's house she is taken out of bed at midnight and told to sing for the guests. Her father C. L. Franklin is a famous preacher. He has a large church in Detroit and the house is always full. She sings in church. The voice settled young. Her mother lives apart. Then she dies. Aretha becomes pregnant at twelve. The narrative states it directly and leaves who did it unsaid. From there the film is a career. Her father takes her to a record company. Jazz standards are recorded and do not work. Years pass. Nine albums and none of them sells. Then she changes companies. She moves to Atlantic. They take her to a studio in Alabama. Muscle Shoals. Something happens there. She sits at the piano and does the arrangement herself. The narrative builds that scene as the turning point. The record works. The song in the title belongs to someone else. Aretha rearranges it and it becomes something entirely different. At the same time her private life worsens. Her husband Ted White is both her manager and violent. The drinking starts. What the narrative is interested in is not fame but control: its idea is that she was managed all her life first by her father and then by her husband, and that music was the only ground of her own. The civil rights movement is inside the narrative too. Martin Luther King is a friend of the family and Aretha gives concerts. The last section takes place in a church in 1972. She returns to gospel and records an album. The narrative ends there. Aretha Franklin chose Jennifer Hudson herself. She had said before she died that she wanted her. The songs are in the actor's voice and were recorded live. Liesl Tommy directed; she comes from the theatre and this is her first film. Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald and Mary J. Blige are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes musical biography and performance. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure; the narrative applies the genre's known steps in order and the running time is long.