Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace invites you to experience church and come alive

August 19, 2024

Standing at a spot often reserved for male pastors, Aretha Franklin delivers her own kind of sermon in the decades-in-the-making concert film “Amazing Grace.”

The rawness of Franklin’s performance, captured on film over two nights of live performances at a Los Angeles church in 1972, showcases her talents through the penetrating power of gospel music. At times, it seemed she was so focused and in the spirit that she grasped the pulpit to remain upright.

“It’s an experience and ministry,” said producer Tirrell D. Whittley after an Easter weekend showing at an art house theater in Athens, Ga. “What better weekend to deliver ‘Amazing Grace’ and allow audiences across the country to get a little more church, a little extra church.”

Many times in movies or television shows, Whittley says the black church is presented in different ways, whether it’s a comedy or drama, that sometimes are overly dramatic or isn’t true to form.

“This film, I think it provides a level of context that for me, growing up in the Baptist church, was very familiar, but on point. There were certain things that happened and certain emotions that are created and that are delivered,” he says.

Before the screening on the opening weekend of the movie’s nationwide release, director and producer Alan Elliott hopped onto the stage and encouraged the Good Friday audience to treat his movie like a church service.

Many of us did just that.

When the Rev. James Cleveland reminded the crowd 47 years ago attending the recording at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church to shake the hand of someone next to them and tell them, “I love the Lord,” we did it. In Georgia decades later, I turned to my husband in our cushioned theater seats, glasses in cupholders and a bag of popcorn half eaten, and repeated the line. So did the folks all around us.

When people in the audience raised their hands, a physical demonstration of praise to God, during Franklin’s performances, so did a woman up front in our screening, which at 87 minutes is about the typical length of my church’s Sunday service.

Most of us — a racially diverse crowd that included college students and those who appeared to be retirees — clapped, swayed, rocked and even bounced our bodies in our seats. In the dark theater, others appeared to sniffle and wipe tears when Franklin began to sing with clarity “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and other songs.

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I’ve listed to the album often since Franklin died in August 2018, but seeing her form the words to hymns and gospel songs, from “Amazing Grace” to “Precious Memories” to “Never Grow Old,” while droplets of sweat clung to her face and around her Afro, transcended my experience from watching to worshiping God along with her.

Wesley Morris of the New York Times writes that the film offers “some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you.” Just last week, she received a 2019 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

Elliott, who said he spent 12 years making the movie (with 13½ hours of footage and 10 more reels recently sent to him, he noted), agreed to a deal in 2018 with the Franklin estate to release the film.

As Washington Post reviewer Ann Hornaday wrote, “Thanks to his tenacity, and the gifts of digital technology, ‘Amazing Grace’ can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory.”

The movie offered an authentic and joyous worship experience, if you allowed it to take you there.

I’ve attended other concerts on Easter weekend, including waiting out storms one year to join several thousand people at a Good Friday outdoor service in Atlanta’s suburbs with music led by Chris Tomlin and a message by the Pastor Louie Giglio of Passion City Church. I’ve also sung and played the piano for Easter services.

Instead of today’s glitzy Christian concerts — and even church services — with bands and singers parading across the stage with cordless microphone and screens flashing the lyrics and visual images like kaleidoscopes and landscapes, her backdrop was a mural portraying Jesus rising out of the water with followers and the sparkling silver vests of the Southern California Community Choir members. Simple yet stylish.

The technology used today in church services and concerts wasn’t available when the concert was filmed in 1972 by director Sydney Pollack. It was never released because of technical difficulties. The “Amazing Grace” album was released in July 1972, and became the best-selling gospel album with more than 2 million copies sold. Some people in my screening murmured acknowledgment as Franklin started singing well-known songs such as “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

At one point, Cleveland moves to an empty row, head bowed in his handkerchief. Later, in a release of emotion, he throws a balled-up towel toward the piano and Franklin, hitting the camera. It captures the uncontrollable reactions sometimes experienced in church, but years later also provides a light, humorous touch in the film.

There was a spiritual purpose to the filming, as The Post’s review notes, “bearing witness to sacred vocation, commitment to faith and continuity of ancestral memory.”

The cameras caught crowd members grinning and laughing, even as Cleveland (who died in 1991) encouraged people to seize the moment when the cameramen turned to them. Standing. Swaying. They yelled “Aretha.” They cheered her on. When the camera zoomed to focus on Mick Jagger standing in the back of the church and clapping during “Climbing Higher Mountains,” others spontaneously stood up in response to Franklin’s vocals, blocking him from view.

“It really is best seen communal,” says Whittley, who lives in suburban Atlanta and is a deacon. “It’s like going to church.”

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