145 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
Aretha Franklin learns to sing in her father’s church and spends the next two decades fighting the men who want to manage her voice for her. Respect lines up every biopic beat like dominoes and knocks them down on schedule. Jennifer Hudson is the only thing in it as big as the woman it is about.
Respect traces Aretha Franklin from a child singing in her father’s Detroit church to the woman who records “Amazing Grace” before a live congregation. The film moves through the familiar biopic stations of a controlling father, an abusive husband, a bottle, and a breakthrough. What the film is actually about is a woman claiming ownership of her own voice. Every man near her treats that voice as property. Aretha sings from the time she is a girl, but the music becomes hers only when she stops asking permission.
Jennifer Hudson plays Aretha as a performer who is loud onstage and silenced everywhere else. She sings the numbers live and fills them with the kind of power that explains why the role exists. Forest Whitaker plays C. L. Franklin, the preacher father who manages his daughter’s career and her childhood with the same controlling hand. Marlon Wayans plays Ted White, the husband who starts as a protector and curdles into a fist. Audra McDonald plays Barbara Franklin, the mother whose early absence haunts the rest of the film, and Mary J. Blige plays Dinah Washington as a mentor who tells the truth without softening it. Marc Maron plays producer Jerry Wexler and Tituss Burgess plays Rev. James Cleveland, the men who finally let Aretha drive the room.
Liesl Tommy directs her first feature after a career in theater, and the instinct shows in how she stages the music as drama rather than spectacle. The centerpiece is the night at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where Aretha and a room of session players build “I Never Loved a Man” from a half-formed idea into a hit. Tommy shoots the sequence as work, with the song assembled piece by piece at the piano. Tracey Scott Wilson’s script keeps returning to that piano as the one place Aretha controls. The problem is that the screenplay treats the rest of the life as a checklist and races through decades to reach the next song.
Respect is a conventional film built around an unconventional talent. It hits the beats a music biopic is required to hit and rarely finds an angle on them that feels new. Hudson is the reason to watch. She carries the emotional weight the script keeps gesturing at and delivers in the musical numbers what the dialogue scenes only describe. The film never matches the woman at its center, but it is smart enough to hand her the microphone and get out of the way.