‘Tina’ details Turner’s survival and triumph
It’s been 40 years since Tina Turner sat with Carl Arrington, the music editor of People magazine, to share the horrifying details of her marriage to Ike Turner, her husband and musical partner of 16 years. By then, it had been five years since the Turners’ marriage ended with her filing for divorce from the man who tortured, raped and otherwise abused her, until she managed to escape.
Arrington explains his understanding of what led her to come forward with that harrowing account of her life with Ike Turner in HBO’S “Tina.” He says, “I think she told me so much because she wanted to just tell it and then forget it.”
Turner’s thinking was that people might stop asking her about her former husband if they only knew. Instead, those painful memories became part and parcel of the Tina Turner story.
‘Tina’ serves as closure, but requires one more retelling
In “Tina,” the star recalls that when Kurt Loder suggested the writing of “I, Tina: My Life Story,” the best-selling memoir that followed her career-defining “Private Dancer” album, “I wasn’t interested in telling that ridiculously embarrassing story of my life.”
That memoir hits the streets in 1986, followed by the 1993 film adaptation, “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” starring Angela Bassett.
Then came “Tina,” a musical based on her life story, which opened in London in 2018, and finally HBO’S “Tina,” a feature documentary from Oscar-winning directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin.
Erwin Bach, the husband she married in 2013, sees the musical and documentary as the closure she’s been chasing.
But with that closure came the need to tell that story one more time, which she did in a series of interviews filmed in her chateau in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2019, the same year she turned 80.
Tina Turner’s journey is one of heartbreak and triumph
What emerges is a damning portrait of her former husband, to be sure, but no one makes Ike Turner seem more like a cartoon movie villain here than he does. His efforts at damage control are pathetic at best. He comes off as completely detached from reality, blaming the victim and refusing to accept responsibility.
His ex-wife doesn’t hold back on the chilling details of a dysfunctional marriage she refers to as “living a life of death.” And yet, she tends to offset those vivid accounts of abuse at her former husband’s hands with empathy and understanding.
“At a certain stage, forgiveness has to take over,” she says.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film is that Ike Turner is given his due as a talented artist whose “Rocket 88” is often thought of as the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. There’s no attempt to underplay the monster he so clearly was. But Turner’s artistry is treated as a separate matter altogether, which is rare for 2021.
It’s a heartbreaking journey with moments of triumph, including Turner playing to a crowd of 186,000 in Rio and the audience adoring her during a curtain call at the musical based on her life.
But every triumph here is offset by the sense that there are scars that never fully healed.