Amazing Grace Film: LLC
The world lost the Queen of Soul last August, but Aretha Franklin lives on in the astonishing concert film Amazing Grace. It’s showing right now only at AMC Dine-In (former Sundance), but I’m worried you might miss your chance to see this important movie because it’s being released at the same time as the latest Marvel film, Endgame. Do your soul a favor and do the right thing. (The Spike Lee reference is intentional; he, along with Franklin, is a producer of Amazing Grace.)
Those familiar with the Gospel of Aretha know that she started out as a gospel singer, traveling the country as a child with her father, C.L. Franklin, a civil rights activist with the “million-dollar voice” who was the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit.
But Amazing Grace is a concert film, not a sentimentalized biopic. It’s not where you go to learn Aretha’s rich backstory. It is a film that helps you understand why, as President Obama said, “American history wells up when Aretha sings.”
It is framed brilliantly around one live recording session that took place over two nights in 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. A Warner Brothers crew, directed by the late Sydney Pollack, captures a scene of a rather ordinary church. The walls are drab, the lighting pedestrian. And yet the magic that happens there is something to behold.
Aretha was already a superstar. But you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She seems shy and a bit overwhelmed by the lights and attention, averting her eyes from the camera people bustling around her. That is, until the music starts. Then any shred of self-consciousness evaporates. Something pours out of her. She closes her eyes, and sings, sliding up and down the range, from breathy whisper to gorgeous wails. She cries.
Aretha is backed by the Rev. James Cleveland, himself a marvelous performer, who is visibly moved by her astonishing voice, sinking down with his head in his handkerchief. The choir and the people in the pews leap up, moan, dance and throw their hands up in the air. She sits down at the battered Steinway and enters a trance, gently playing the piano and allowing her faith, her love, to shine.
Aretha’s backing band pumps out the funkiest gospel jams while the crowd sways. The amazing choir director, Alexander Hamilton, dances as he conducts. It’s history and culture and religion all together. We are undone. And that’s just the first night.
On night two, famous gospel singer Clara Ward enters the church with Aretha’s father (they were romantically involved). Rev. Franklin delivers a short sermon, reminding everyone that seeing his daughter’s success reminded him of her singing in the living room at age four: “I want to bust wide open,” he says. In the next song, Aretha’s father mops sweat off her forehead while she sings, an act of tenderness captured for the ages.
For many complicated reasons, it took 46 years for this film to make it to the public. Now it serves as a testament to one of the greatest singers our country has produced. It also honors the black churches that launched her — and created the foundations of funk, soul and jazz. The people in the pews knew they were in the presence of greatness. You can spot young Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones in the audience.
“I’m so glad I got religion,” Aretha sings. “My soul is satisfied.” May the Queen rest in peace.
