'Amazing Grace': A Celebration Of Aretha Franklin Which She Never Wanted You To See

AMAZING GRACE

★★★

Though released in the wake of Aretha Franklin’s death, Amazing Grace isn’t a biopic. It’s no regular rockumentary, either. There’s no talking heads, no illustrative imagery, no potted history lessons. Instead, there’s 87 minutes of Aretha Franklin, in a Los Angeles Baptist Church in 1972, recording her live album Amazing Grace.

After a few title cards on opening, you’re dropped into it: a production that’s part live show, part logistical undertaking, part church service. Inside a small space, there’s recording equipment, a film crew, a crowd/congregation, two ministers, a choir, a random at-the-back-of-the-audience appearance from the Rolling Stones. And, at the centre of it all, is the Queen Of Soul: 30 years old, at the peak of her powers, belting out hymnals and spirituals.

There’s a purity in this. As essential companion piece to the live album, Amazing Grace is presented as a work of music: unconcerned with narrative, only with Franklin’s voice. The songs are the draw; and for Aretha fans, witnessing this footage will be rapturous, borderline religious. For those who aren’t fans — or who, for that matter, find religion detestable — it won’t be nearly as charming.

Amazing Grace is also a fascinating cinematic time capsule. It was shot, on the ground and in the moment, in 1972. That’s reflected in the ultra wide collars, the afros, the patterned shirts, the kaftans, the Mick Jagger sighting. A huge appeal of the film is watching the faces of the congregation and choristers; picking out individuals, each inhabiting the frame as fully-formed people, not bland extras or washed out faces.

It’s hot and sweaty in there, from production lights, the gathering of bodies, the growing delirium found when How I Got Over and Climbing Higher Mountains turn into rave-ups. There’s beauty, and humanity, in the beads of sweat glinting on the face of Franklin, or running in rivulets of the visage of her chief collaborator, Rev. James Cleveland. It feels like you’re there, even though there is in the distant past.

Refusing to give much context to the performance makes Amazing Grace experiential, but, in some ways, it also lessens the experience. There’s mention of the Sydney Pollack’s original footage being shelved for “technical problems” and abandoned for 30 years. But there’s no mention of the fact that, after producer Alan Elliott purchased the rolls of film in 2007, Franklin herself spent her remaining years fighting against its release; suing the filmmakers twice over — once in 2011, again in 2015 — from screening it.

Other questions, and mysteries, are left open; none more so than when a scuffle breaks out in the front pew. The cameras, almost like TV news crews, try to see what’s happening; and it turns out to be a brief, if-the-spirit-moves-you clash between mother/daughter gospel legends Gertrude Mae Ward and Clara Ward. But there’s no mention of their history, which suggests a whole other untold story; nor of Franklin’s own (oft-troubling) upbringing.

The singer, in fact, never speaks between songs. All the talking is handled by the duelling reverends; the service hosted by Cleveland and, later in proceedings, her father CL Franklin. Aretha is, merely, a member of the choir, someone to sing to the glory of God, but stay away from the oration. This means that Amazing Grace is at once a celebration of Aretha’s peerless pipes whilst, at the same time, a film that feels like it’s lacking her voice.

THE FAREWELL

★★★1/2

The “based on a true lie” hook is simple: when an aging Chinese matriarch is diagnosed with terminal cancer, her extended family — though scattered across continents — commit to a singular ruse, vowing to keep her diagnosis, and her fate, from her. A hastily-arranged wedding back in China reunites the family, and allows them to gather for what’s, really, a grand goodbye to grandma.

Family gathering movies — in which an ensemble cast descends on one place for a wedding, funeral, or celebration — are plentiful, routine staples of ‘indie’ filmmaking. Usually, they’re played for host-of-quirky-caricatures laughs or as forum for the shaking of grand soap operatic skeletons from a familial closet. But The Farewell is perfectly pitched at a different, very distinct tone: bittersweetness. There’s no zany uncles or moments of scandalous revelation. Nor is its pitch-meeting premise some simple sitcom contrivance. Instead, it’s an exploration of this grand ruse, and the culture that normalises it.

Director Lulu Wang isn’t just making a based-on-real-events movie, but one drawing from her own experiences. That there’s auto fiction at play isn’t remarkable unto itself, but it does suggest how she’s able to interrogate the premise, rather than just use it as scaffolding on which to hang clichés.

Awkwafina plays the character that’s, clearly, a stand-in for the author: she the young Asian American, living in New York City, who can’t understand why lying to a dying woman about her terminal illness is something anyone can stomach, let alone happily participate in. But there’s push-back on her ‘Western’ ideas of prizing truth, transparency, legality, individuality. “You think a life belongs to oneself,” counters one uncle, who sees the deception as a way of a whole family taking the “burden” of dying away from a single person, and sharing it amongst the collective.

In these conversations about culture, The Farewell is a greater exploration of the diaspora; digging into themes grown out of emigration and return, families living in different countries and cultures. ‘Local’ characters herein are obsessed with charting the differences between China and America; and the key siblings, split between China, Japan, and America, all have different viewpoints on their lives, and different cultural values from their experiences. This means that, though The Farewell is a crowd-pleaser, there’s nothing saccharine in its warmth, nothing cheap in its depiction of family dynamics. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it’s a finely-honed work of drama.

THE KITCHEN

★1/2

“We don’t want to traffic in stereotypes!” Bill Camp says, playfully, midway into The Kitchen. This line isn’t exactly played for comedy, but it’s sure hilarious. For, The Kitchen is a crime movie trafficking entirely in stereotypes. 

Melissa McCarthy, Elisabeth Moss, and Tiffany Haddish headline as a trio of put-upon wives who, when their husbands are arrested, take over their organised-crime racket. As these sisters do it for themselves — and by ‘it’ I mean take bribes, engage in racketeering, and ‘wack’ those who cross them — director Andrea Berloff struggles to find much humanity in the characters, wit in the story, or tonal coherence in the picture.

It’s the kind of movie where someone will finally arrive at a moment of violent retribution, emotional catharsis, and becoming-the-monster symbolism — like, say, murdering a violent husband and dumping his body in the river — only for it to be essentially forgotten five seconds later. There’s a sense of whiplash as The Kitchen blithely barrels along from scene to scene, killing to killing, montage to montage.

Berloff adapted the plot from a comic book mini-series, but stops short of giving The Kitchen an actual comic edge, in either sense. Whilst Camp, Annabella Sciorra, and Character Actress Margo Martindale get to play things loose and fun, and the colours are bright and ridiculous, there’s no sense of style or stylisation; no embrace of pulpiness or attempt at rendering a fantastical world.

Here, when someone sadly dies (as opposed to all the other deaths we’re not invited to care about), their scenic-cemetery funeral is soundtracked by tender acoustic guitar pluckings. Most of the rest of the time, music-wise, we just hear Fleetwood Mac songs. The use of expensive song placements is symbolic of the whole: The Kitchen’s many classic rock stings — and the montages set to them — only betray just how beholden it is to crime movie clichés.

DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE

★★★

Plenty of action movies have portrayed hard bitten cops as men out of time, but few have done it so politically — or, perhaps, identity-politically — as S Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete. Zahler’s third feature It reunites him with his Brawl In Cell Block 99 star Vince Vaughn, and partners him up with a very symbolic figure: Mel Gibson.

These angry men are hard working cops in fictitious Bulwark — aka, Everymen in Nowheresville, USA — who’re bluntly racist/sexist. In a stagey first act that feels like alt-right virtue signalling, Zahler has them deliver grand proclamations on the contemporary climate. Don Johnson, playing a higher up officer, says: “being branded a racist in today’s public forum is like being branded a Communist in the ’50s.” Vaughn offers, in an awkward, unconvincing line-reading: “there’s certainly nothing hypocritical about the media handling every perceived intolerance with complete and utter intolerance.” And, later, Gibson spits: “I don’t politick, I don’t change with the times, and it turns out that shit’s more important than good, honest work.”

Though Gibson is suspended for roughing up a suspect, this isn’t a study of racial biases and militarised aggression in policing. Instead, this opening is merely the lengthy preamble to what becomes a one-last-job dual heist movie; with Gibson going to Udo Kier (also just appearing in a far better politically-minded B movie: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau) to get the lowdown on a robbing the robbers job. Gibson and Vaughn, with the percolating anger of the blue collar worker ill-compensated for the years of toil, team up to seize some ill-gotten gains; though the film is also no commentary on criminality in the time of late capitalism (shouts to Andrew Dominik’s great Killing Them Softly).

Dragged Across Concrete is long, relatively slow (one sequence captures the tedium of stakeouts), and methodical; but blessed with the bizarre details that’ve won Zahler pulp-auteur status. His Western-turned-gruesome-nightmare debut, Bone Tomahawk, showed astonishing directorial command; and here there’s precision in every frame, and a palpable sense of ever-mounting dread. There’s also, of course, brutal violence, much of it delivered by a pair of villains — billed only, in the credits, as Black Gloves and Grey Gloves — who have no skin on show, even their faces covered completely by balaclavas and black goggles. They express themselves, largely, through their sprays of automatic weaponfire (in a way that reminds me of that language in Nadav Lapid’s film about language, Synonyms, about “playing” a machine gun and “perforating” a body).

No one, herein, gets off unharmed; most are both practitioners and victims of shows of power. It’s almost like an ultraviolent neo-noir: All-American greed luring all parties involved down into a moral quicksand, and to their sure demise. But, even then, in a final theoretically emotional moment, Zahler has Gibson smashing a mobile phone to bits, filled with rage at the status of the device, and the empowerment of the woman on the other end. ‘Til its dying breath, Dragged Across Concrete resounds as an old man’s howl of rage at a world that’s passed them by.

DOGMAN

★★★★

Though he’s best known for his sprawling 2008 crime-saga Gomorrah, Matte Garrone’s films are, usually, studies in obsession; films in which disenfranchised outsiders become destructively fixated on an idea, a standard, or another person. Dogman keeps to that thematic beat; so much so that it can be seen as a sister picture to the Italian filmmaker’s breakout 2002 film The Embalmer.

It’s shot in the same sad, surreal, shadowy seaside locale — Castel Volturno in Campania, infamous as mafia stronghold —where apartment block towers and deserted streets feel like you’re in the last outpost of a Western, or perhaps some post-apocalyptic ruin. And, again, as with The Embalmer, the plot riffs on a real life tall tale in which a small, maligned figure falls in thrall to a big, handsome lunk.

Here, Marcello Fonte plays a nebbish, benevolent dog groomer; a tiny figure who oft pales in comparison to the gargantuan, aggressive hounds he fusses over. He’s a well meaning if clueless separated father, a scuba enthusiast, and part time local coke dealer. As easy mark, he’s bullied into accompanying local lowlifes on robbery jobs, but never given a fair cut. The chief bully is the coked up, raging, swollen Edoardo Pesce; a swaggering, idiotic alpha male who entrances Fonte with his status, but treats him horribly.

In such, Dogman is essentially a portrait of an abusive relationship Garrone lighting the fuse and waiting, patiently, for that moment when the long suffering party snaps, turning from victim to vigilante in an instant. What results is another film where setting, mood, and directorial vision combine for something singular, and singularly unsettling.