Putting Aretha Franklin’s life story on screen is a no-brainer. Her impact on music alone warrants such. Add in the more intimate details of her life and you’re looking at the elements for a surefire hit. So much so that two biographical projects based on Franklin’s life and career are coming our way this year.
National Geographic’s Genius: Aretha is the first of those projects to be released. Starring Oscar-nominee and Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winner Cynthia Erivo as the Queen of Soul, the eight-part anthology attempts to tell the complete story of the legend’s journey from her adolescence in Detroit to her culture-defining course to becoming one of music’s quintessential artists.
Is Genius: Aretha a project that sets the tone for how the Queen should be honored on film or is it merely a rush to the finish line in a race to be the first Aretha Franklin piece out there?
Music is key to any work involving Franklin, but Genius: Aretha takes that notion and runs with it. It functions more like a musical than a traditional biopic. This style brings writer/showrunner Suzan-Lori Parks closer to her Pulitzer Prize-winning theater wheelhouse than her most recent efforts for the screen, 2019’s Native Son remake and this year’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and the comfort in that type of storytelling shows.
Instead of using a chronologically ordered sequence of events, she implements a nonlinear timeline to tell Franklin’s story. The first episode opens with an adult Aretha at a 1967 performance in Chicago. From there, the rest of the episode alternates between her childhood and the events taking place in and around a recording session at the legendary Muscle Shoals music studio.
Parks’s use of this narrative structure should please both casual and die-hard Franklin fans because it establishes a direct connection between the events of Franklin’s life and how they influenced the number she’s writing, recording, or performing. The only flaw in this approach is there was little room to witness what Franklin felt when she encountered the situations that led to the songs, but you can conclude those feelings from the songs’ lyrics so it’s not a huge deal.
Executive music producer Raphael Saadiq and composer Terence Blanchard go beyond simply replaying Franklin’s music. They break the tracks down to their bare bones and show how the layer-by-layer building of her songs. You become a part of the process and the finished products give the ultimate payoff of making you move in your seat, sing along, or both.
The acting does take a backseat to the musical aspect of Genius: Aretha, but that’s more so due to the high quality of the music than the performances in its cast. Like Parks, this is a quasi-return to theater for Ervio due to its musical theater aura and reminds one why she’s only an Oscar win away from the EGOT club.
She looks and sounds nothing like Franklin, but Erivo still gives a portrayal that feels like Franklin. The ability to be soulful without oversinging places Erivo’s covers of Franklin’s music among the best you’ll hear. Away from the microphone, Erivo has a dignity that emanates royalty as she refuses to settle for less than what she wants. On the other side of that, she also exudes the unpretentiousness that humanizes Franklin as a person from Detroit who happens to have a God-given voice.
Courtney B. Vance and Malcolm Barrett provide strong support as Reverend L.C. Franklin and Ted White, respectively. Vance is on the fun end of things as he hams it up to show Rev. Franklin was equal parts man of the cloth and man of the streets. Barrett is solid in his heavier role as Franklin’s abusive and inept husband/manager. He’s not quite sinister, but he’s nefarious enough to be called trash repeatedly in almost every appearance.
Based on what National Geographic provided for the screening, Genius: Aretha is a highly entertaining project. Parks’s utilization of the music as the series’s driving force works well, as does Saadiq’s and Blanchard’s meticulous dissection and building of Franklin’s songs. Eviro turns in a performance that will indeed have her in the Emmy race while Vance and Barrett offer jolts on opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum.
It’s far from being the definitive Aretha Franklin story because it neglects to address Franklin’s direct thoughts and feelings on her experiences in the moment. However, there is far too much to enjoy in Genius: Aretha to pass it up.
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