Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Aretha Franklin Lives in Amazing Grace

It only took more than four decades for Amazing Grace—the roof-shaking Sydney Pollack and Alan Elliott film that captures Aretha Franklin recording her groundbreaking 1972 gospel album—to see the light of day. And according to V.F. film critic K. Austin Collins, the movie itself is more than worth the wait. “In Amazing Grace, you watch, in startling, long close-ups, as the singer gears up to lean into the most soaring, difficult passages in her music,” he writes in a rhapsodic review. “You see [Rev. James] Cleveland, who accompanies her on piano, stopping midway through the titular song to compose himself; he is weeping. You see the audience practically falling out of its seats; Mick Jagger and Charlie Wattsbopping along in back; members in the choir, sitting behind Aretha, who have to stop and stare in astonishment. You see Aretha taking breaks between songs, too—moments that testify, above all, to her consummate professionalism.” The bottom line? This movie “is a rare object: something truly mythical, something we’d only ever told stories about, that having finally arrived somehow lives up to its name.”
Elsewhere in HWD, Donald Liebenson digs into the strange history of Amazing Grace and its winding road to the big screen; Sonia Saraiya swoons for Killing Eve,which just returned for its second season; Laura Bradleychats with the Queer Eye cast about its whirlwind visit to Washington, D.C.; and the Little Gold Men team wonders if the Emmys race is over before it even begins.