RESPECT
Soul sisters: Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin with Mary J. Blige as Dinah Washington.
★★★
OUT 10 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 145 MINS
DIRECTOR Liesl Tommy
CAST Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayans, Audra McDonald, Marc Maron, Tituss Burgess
PLOT Daughter of an influential preacher, Clarence Franklin (Whitaker), Aretha Franklin (Hudson) has extraordinary musical talent. But her career is slow to start as she struggles to control and define her own sound, under the influence of her father and her sometimes domineering husband Ted White (Wayans).
ARETHA FRANKLIN LIVED a long life, and never followed the simple rags-to-riches-todrug-addiction-to-rebirth narrative of so many of her contemporaries. Franklin was born into relative comfort and driven by a complicated mix of ruthless ambition and filial piety rather than desperate poverty. Yet from this complexity, theatre director Leisl Tommy crafts a fairly basic, if largely effective, narrative, focusing on Franklin’s efforts first to find her own sound and then to overcome the demons that threaten to overwhelm her.