MOVIE REVIEW
“Amazing Grace”
Not rated. At AMC Loews Boston Common (and Coolidge Corner Theatre starting Friday).
Grade A+
Aretha. In concert.
But “Amazing Grace” is not the greatest hits concert film you’d expect.
“Amazing Grace” documents the two nights in January 1972, 47 years ago, that Franklin, at the height of her youthful fame, raised the roof and the souls at the tiny New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles with a gospel concert for the ages.
Taking its title from the classic spiritual President Barack Obama sang during his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, “Amazing Grace” is mesmerizing, uplifting and, despite the cameras and even Mick Jagger in the last pew, practically a religious experience.
We see how small and plain this church is, how large looms the Rev. James Cleveland, the concert’s genial, jovial host, and the Southern California Community Choir.
From brief shots of the congregation, director Sidney Pollack and his camera crews, comes the real beginning as the Queen of Soul, then 29, casually makes her way down the aisle.
Franklin first began singing publicly as a pre-teen with her father, the Baptist minister the Rev. C.L. Franklin. This is the music and the place that made her Aretha Franklin.
She plays the piano, the choir soars and close-ups let us see not just the sweat pour out of her but also the focus and range she brings to these songs.
On the second night, her father, a legendary figure in the Baptist world, speaks to the congregation. He is truly remarkable, wise, witty, gracious and passionate. A bit later as Aretha sings and sweats with traditional spirituals and church versions of Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy” and Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” her father gets up and wipes her face with his handkerchief.
The recorded album, also named “Amazing Grace,” stands as not only the best-selling gospel album in history, but Franklin’s best-selling album ever.
The decades-long delay was initially due to Pollack’s inexperience (or ineptitude). This future director of “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” failed to use a clapperboard before each reel, making synchronization between sight and sound impossible until it was all digitally remastered.
Then for reasons no one ever really understood, Franklin blocked the release. Perhaps she wanted “Amazing Grace” to stand, as it so beautifully does, as her (monumental) epitaph.
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