This Aretha’s lost her soul
Respect
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 25mins ★★★★★
Copshop
Cert: 15, 1hr 48mins ★★★★★
Herself
Cert: 15, 1hr 37mins ★★★★★
Right at the end of Respect, the new biopic of Aretha Franklin, its makers score something of an own goal. For the best part of 140 minutes we’ve been watching Dreamgirls star Jennifer Hudson doing a pretty good job of portraying the anointed ‘Queen of Soul’.
And then, as the end credits start to roll, there is the woman herself. She’s in her 70s, just three years before her death in 2018, and she’s belting out Natural Woman at Washington’s Kennedy Center to a pumpedup audience that includes a delighted Barack Obama. She’s absolutely on fire – her voice is strong, her power and charisma undeniable. For the first time, you can feel the hairs on the back of your neck start to prickle.
And suddenly we realise what’s been everso-slightly missing from the previous two hours, and from Hudson’s perfectly proficient performance. Franklin’s musical journey – from gospel protegée in Detroit to troubled global superstar – is covered well, but as to what made her such an iconic figure in the black civil rights and women’s rights movements… well, rather less so.
It can’t just be because her chapel-filling preacher father mixed civil rights and God in his firebrand sermons? Or that Martin Luther King was a family friend? Or that she was sexually abused as a child (she was 12 when she first became pregnant) and physically abused by both her controlling father and husband? There surely had to be a power, anger and iron will that burned within, but that’s what we don’t really see.
I’m sure first-time feature director Liesl Tommy would say it’s all there in the screenplay, but it’s not quite all there in Hudson’s performance. Forest Whitaker is terrific as Franklin’s domineering father, and Marlon Wayans impresses as her even more obnoxious husband/manager, but Hudson seems constrained by a film that, while undeniably delivering some fabulous musical moments, insists on defining Franklin by her relationships with men.
Copshop feels like something Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter might have dreamt up if they ever got together, particularly if they bumped into In Bruges director Martin McDonagh along the way. It’s a very black, very violent comedy with a body count that increases at a truly alarming rate. As the title suggests, it’s set in a remote American police station, where one resourceful female
officer (Alexis Louder) and her less impressive male colleagues have unwittingly arrested two hitmen – played by Frank Grillo and Gerard Butler – and placed them in adjoining cells. Let the banter and carnage begin, in a film that will be too violent for many – me included – but is well made and features a fabulous performance from Louder.
The Irish actress Clare Dunne worked with Mamma Mia! director Phyllida Lloyd on a trilogy of filmed Shakespeare plays, and now they’ve teamed up again, with Dunne starring in a film she also co-wrote and Lloyd directing a far more modest production than she – and we – are used to. Herself is the story of Sandra, a young Dublin mother struggling to escape an abusive marriage and hoping she might be able to scrape together enough money to build her own house. Slightly too good to be true at times, it’s nevertheless rather lovely.