I'm a big fan of the late Aretha Franklin, especially her breakthrough albums and singles when she switched to the Atlantic label in 1967, so this latest musical biopic of a big popular music star, in the wake of the recently successful Freddie Mercury and Elton John movies, should have gone down well with me. However like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Rocket Man" before it, besides playing fast and loose with the real-life story (there's a Rolling Stone fact-checking article highlighting the most obvious exaggerations, shortcuts or even inventions of this production), the film suffers greatly from its pacing and construction.
I totally get that making her live double gospel album "Amazing Grace" in 1972 meant a lot to Franklin, but was it really such a big deal musically even if it was a big commercial success and enough to hang the ending of the movie on? Regardless of which, it serves as the upbeat climax of the film, doing multiple work in that respect as a bold artistic move for a major act, the expiation of all her recent troubles with drink and divorce as well as a reconciliation after several years with her neglected minister father and sisters. This seems to be the way with these modern day musical features, locate a career high-point for the artist and make it the culmination of the film on a kind of clichéd send-the-audience-home-happy culmination, never mind that in Aretha's case, she still had nearly 50 years of life left to live after completing that project.
With really clunky, often unnatural, expository dialogue used at almost every turn, (example: - when Aretha disses her sister Erma by saying to her "You only ever had one hit single", yes, we get it, the song in question being "Piece Of My Heart" but there are several others which made me wince with every unsubtle inclusion), I also felt the film dragged for the last hour even if it was setting up the gospel concert finale, which actually I didn't enjoy, watching Aretha painfully slow down the familiar "Amazing Grace" to a drawn-out, histrionic dirge. It seemed to me too that her ties to the Civil Rights movement were a bit over-played, while on the musical front, was it really necessary for the director to airbrush the likes of Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin from her history, both crucial figures in her record-making career?
On the plus side, the staged musical numbers are excellent, as Aretha guides the experienced Muscle Shoals crack studio musicians to bring about her debut hit "I Ain't Never Loved A Man", the impromptu early morning arrangement she and her sisters concoct for her killer version of Otis Redding's "Respect" and her various live performances of the time. Jennifer Hudson delivers a fine star performance in the lead role especially in recreating Franklin's vocal delivery.
In the end though, the film seemed to my eyes rather overlong, cliché-ridden and disappointingly stolid and stilted, if obviously well-meaning version of Aretha's story. Perhaps just a little too much respect was shown for the great singer's legacy which I felt prevented the story coming truly alive.
