Amazing Grace was a labor of love that Sydney Pollack was never able to pull off alive. He was always too busy according to IMDB, to finish syncing voice to video. Instead, before he died of cancer, he handed off the project to Alan Elliott (whose IMDB bio does not glean much info, besides a personal blog link to a spooky place that hasn’t been touched since the early aughts). Sure, Alan has done a lot of composing, but this is his first directorial production.
My guess is he’s a man of few words. The only narrative contained were the four to five captions that started the film. Perfection for a music purist, a mindset of, “Just let the girl (and marvelous choir and studio band) sing and play”. Raw footage without ‘story interruptus’ allows the audience the vicarious awe and joy as the church onlookers dance, cry and shout out passionate spiritual yelps.
Yet, I was still hungry for story….what was happening behind the scenes? What was Aretha like as a woman? Why didn’t she want this made until after she passed away?
Story implied in the footage was that her dad was adoring and proud, and I loved the paternal moment where he wiped her adorable 29 year old face of sweat as she began another feverish number.
Maybe it’s that I’m/we’re so use to knowing every intimate detail (and then some) these days of documentary subjects that I felt like I was missing something. Perhaps what I really miss are days like these in 1971 when things were simpler and people were afforded privacy. No one in Aretha’s audience was caught looking zombie like into phones or surreptitiously trying to capture an image on such nuisance contraptions.
So really, Amazing Grace was everything you’d want it to be. And in the words of philosopher Slavoj Zizek, perhaps it’s time for us to stop trying to be progressive to the point of ruination and actually reach back to what worked in the past. I loved the 70’s. And moreover, I also loved Aretha, too.
