Paying Aretha plenty of respect
Amazing Grace U cert, 88 min ★★★★★ Dir Alan Elliott
When Aretha Franklin died in August last year, she bequeathed one mysterious artefact no one had properly seen. It was an unfinished concert film, shot over two consecutive nights at LA’S New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in 1972, where she recorded her live gospel album Amazing Grace. Warner Brothers had hired Sydney Pollack, then one of the hottest directors in town, to document the two sessions, but for undisclosed “technical reasons” the film was never completed or released.
According to Alan Elliott, the man who masterminded its restoration, these had to do with sound-syncing issues, leading to the shelving of this footage for 47 years. An almighty legal wrangle resulted with the star herself, who had been promised her Woodstock and didn’t get it. The record, in the meantime, went double platinum, becoming the bestseller of Franklin’s career and the biggest gospel album of all time. So when the film, after all Elliott’s digging and reassembly, was presented to the Toronto film festival in 2015, Aretha sued, wanting a $10million settlement.
Only now, after negotiations with her estate, is it being made public, and what a vital communion it proves to be with her colossal talent. As an album, Amazing Grace was debatably Franklin’s most personal; as filmmaking, Amazing Grace is reverential, not candid – there are no asides from Franklin, no chitchat, none of the backstage intimacy we expect these days from, say, Beyoncé in Homecoming. The only lengthy talk comes from Rev Dr James Cleveland, the church’s musical director, and from Franklin’s father, Rev CL Franklin, who delivers a sombre eulogy to her gifts near the end. More touching, directly after he’s spoken, is a shot of him carefully wiping off his daughter’s perspiring brow in time for her next song, Never Grow Old.
Aretha famously insisted that the temperature be almost tropical whenever she performed, which you can tell from the beads of sweat soon clustering at her temples. But the heat rises from her voice, too, and seems to flow in waves towards the chorus and crowd. Pollack is spotted pointing his multiple cameras with stabbing gestures towards the audience, who are serially overcome, rising to their feet with hallelujahs, and even passing out.
Less openly affected than anyone else at the occasion was surely its star, at least from the small gestures of appreciation we glimpse, her gathered poise between songs. But if Amazing Grace can’t fathom the inner depths of Aretha in any definitive way, it grants her a great deal more than a little respect.