Jennifer Hudson – Memphis Flyer

Aretha Franklin’s nickname is hidden in plain sight on her 1967 breakthrough hit “Respect.” Coming into the final chorus, her sisters Carolyn and Erma sing “Ree ree ree ree” to kick the song into the stratosphere.

As the new film biography of Aretha — excuse me, Ms. Franklin — establishes in its opening scene, “Ree” was the nickname her father C.L. Franklin gave her as a child. “Come on, Ree,” says Forest Whitaker as the Franklin patriarch. “They want to hear you sing.”

Ree, played by 10-year-old Skye Dakota Turner, belts out a song with a voice that one partygoer describes as “10, but going on 30.”

Musician biopics are always a hard lift. People want to know how their musical idols rose to greatness, but the life of a performing artist is, paradoxically, not terribly cinematic. Sports figures have the big game they won. Generals have triumphs in battle. Musicians and artists, on the other hand, practice in their bedrooms and spend long, boring hours in the recording studio and riding the bus on tour. Their influence seeps through the culture over the course of years. That’s why musician biopics tend to fall into predictable screenwriter shortcuts, which were skewered with pinpoint accuracy by the 2007 comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Forest Whitaker plays her father C.L. Franklin.

The other problem with portraying a once-in-a-century talent on-screen is that the actor who is portraying the artist is, by definition, not as talented as their subject. Jamie Foxx is one of the best actors of his generation, but he can’t sing like Ray Charles. This is less of a problem with Respect, as Ms. Franklin is portrayed as an adult by Jennifer Hudson, who has mad chops. Respect is a big step up from Hudson’s last film, Cats, about which the less said the better.

Seriously, don’t watch Cats.

But you should watch Respect if you’re a fan of Aretha Franklin, or just music in general. Franklin’s life story is more twisty than most musicians who have already gotten biopics. (I’m looking at you, The Doors.) She was born in Memphis, and her father was the pastor of the largest African-American Baptist church in Detroit. She grew up in a household where conversations were sung as often as they were spoken. But her mother Barbara (Audra McDonald) left C.L., who was a serial philanderer, and died young; afterward, Aretha refused to speak for months.

Meanwhile, young Aretha’s notoriety in the gospel music world brought the attention of pedophiles in the church, and she had two children before age 15. Her first husband Ted White (Marlon Wayans) was as abusive and controlling as her father. Respect portrays Franklin as a victim of the patriarchy, which brings the true meaning of the song into focus. Written as a playful, yet undeniably sexist, song about marriage by Otis Redding, Franklin turned it on its ear by gender-swapping the protagonist and created an enduring feminist anthem.

For the moment of the song’s creation, which producer Arif Mardin called the greatest studio session of his long career, director Liesl Tommy turned to Hustle & Flow as inspiration. Being a fly on the wall as inspiration strikes makes for compelling cinema, but the film as a whole is wildly uneven. Tommy is an acclaimed theater director who has worked in television, but this is her first feature film, and it shows. She knows how to handle actors: Hudson’s performance borders on brilliance, showing flashes of the traumatized preacher’s kid even as Franklin uses her boundless talent to reclaim her humanity. Whitaker brings out the complexity in C.L. Franklin, who was a confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as being a not-great father. Mary J. Blige has a short but dynamite turn as blues singer Dinah Washington. Marc Maron nails the exasperated record executive Jerry Wexler, who finally gave Franklin the freedom she needed to create masterpieces. But, too often, Tommy turns to clunky scenes straight out of Walk Hard to advance the plot.

Hudson’s singing is as up to the Aretha challenge as anyone on the planet, especially toward the end when she returns to her gospel roots. But it’s significant that when Franklin sings “Respect” at Madison Square Garden, the performance is smooth and stagy. Even in 2021, the real Queen of Soul is too raw for the big screen.

There’s so much to say about Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I don’t know where to begin.

One of the film’s themes is the nature of power. Since its inception, the film industry has been characterized by a struggle for power between directors, producers, stars, and writers. As seen in Trumbo, the first to lose the battle were the writers, so they decamped to television. The power of the old-line Hollywood studios declined in the late 1960s, so the 1970s saw the ascendance of the director and, as a result, a second golden age of American film. In 1980, the directors’ power was broken on the rocks of Heaven’s Gate, and by the end of the decade, movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Tom Cruise were in charge, commanding high salaries and exerting creative control. The indie film revolution of the 1990s, which Spike Lee helped kick off, was on some level an attempt to reclaim the directors’ power. Now, in the twilight of the movie stars, power has reverted to the producers, and so resources are tied up in making endless sequels and reboots of proven properties. Enter Amazon, the internet retail powerhouse who is making a big push into video. For their first foray into theatrical film, they tapped Lee and apparently gave him free rein. Lee responded by going absolutely insane.

Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata

2015 finds Lee in a familiar state: energized with righteous rage. The director could have taken a look at widespread reports of police brutality against people of color and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, pointed at his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, and said “I told you so!” Instead, he made Chi-Raq, which is like nothing else in theaters today. It’s a satire, a comedy, and a musical. It’s also based on a 2,500-year-old Greek play called Lysistrata, and so it is written mostly in rhyming verse. And yet, Chi-Raq is even weirder than it sounds. The first five minutes or so are essentially a lyric music video for “Pray 4 My City,” with nothing but text and an animated image of a map of the United States made up entirely of guns. When we finally do see someone on screen, it’s the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) rocking a packed club. Then the action freezes, and we meet Dolmedes, the narrator/chorus played by national treasure Samuel L. Jackson in full Rufus Thomas mode.

I would be content listening to Jackson speak in rhyme for two hours. Fortunately, Lee introduces us to Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a powerhouse of confidence and sexual energy. After witnessing the horrors of street violence and having her apartment burned down by a rival gang out to kill her boyfriend Chi-Raq, Lysistrata is inspired by Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) to organize a sex strike, asserting their power by “seizing the means of reproduction.” The gangs will either end their senseless violence or go without booty. The sex strike spreads until, as Dave Chappelle says in a hilarious cameo as a strip-club owner, “Even the hoes is no-shows.”

The sprawling cast includes Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, and token white guy John Cusack as a priest who shouts himself hoarse at a funeral for a little girl killed in the gang crossfire. Cusack looks more engaged and passionate onscreen than he has in years, but his big scene is also a symptom of what’s wrong with Chi-Raq. In isolation, it’s a powerful scene, as Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott indict the whole sociopolitical system that keeps African Americans locked in cycles of poverty and violence. But in the context of the film, it’s a momentum killer. Free to follow his wildest impulses, Lee constructs one killer image after another, but little thought seems to have been given as to how it all fits together, which means Chi-Raq adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.

It’s inspiring to see a talent of Lee’s caliber swing for the fences. Chi-Raq may not be perfect, but I can’t stop thinking about it.