While the singing is marvelous, the acting is off key.
“RESPECT” Rated PG-13. At AMC Boston Common, Regal Fenway, AMC South Bay, Landmark Kendall Square and suburban theaters. Grade: B- Aretha Franklin deserved a better movie than “Respect.” But it will do for now. For those who watched Franklin’s meteoric rise in the 1960s and ’70s, she, like so many of her peers, became famous around the world at the same time as the rise of the American civil rights movement. Their stories are interconnected in so many ways, and this film shows some of that. Franklin’s story begins in 1952 Detroit, where her tyrannical daddy C. L. Franklin (Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker) a Baptist preacher, is telling the story of Daniel in the lion’s den on a Sunday and hosting sodden dinner parties on Saturday night, where his 11-year-old daughter Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) sings. Aretha loses her beloved mother (Audra McDonald) as a girl and we later learn Aretha got pregnant at the age of 12. Aretha is later played by Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson (“Dreamgirls”), and while the singing is marvelous, the acting is off-key. Everyone in the film is trying to nail every line of a screenplay by Tracey Scott Wilson (“Fosse/Verdon”) and Academy award-winner Callie Khouri (“Thelma and Louise”) that is about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
