The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 137 Days to go: 94
Movie #301: What’s Love Got To Do With It
I saw What’s Love Got To Do With It in the theater with my best friend from high school. I remember it so distinctly. When Tina (Angela Bassett) finally fights back against Ike (Laurence Fishburne) in that limo in Texas, the entire audience erupted in cheers and claps — hooting and hollering and pumping their fists in the air — like they’d just seen their favorite team pull off an impossible comeback to win a championship game. I’d never experienced anything like that at the movies before, but we were all caught up in it. We were all behind her, a hundred percent. It was powerful.
Your basic biopic can be interesting and informative (if you’re into that sort of thing) and it can be well-written and structured and masterfully executed in such a way that the finished product is a really good, maybe even great, film. But not too many biopics are important films. They might address important issues or highlight important historical moments — they’re only ever about important people, essentially by definition — but often they’re so focused on the life of their subject that they don’t actually build or convey any kind of message. Message films are another thing altogether. What’s Love Got To Do With It, however, is critically important — not just in its time, but for all time, past, present and future.
The physical abuse endured by Tina Turner at the hands of her husband Ike was terrifyingly brutal. The movie, importantly, doesn’t back down from that. Slaps turn to punches and kicks. Verbal abuse escalates to profanity-laden vitriol. He terrorizes her in private, in public and in front of their children. He even clears his home of people so he can viciously choke and rape her in their personal recording booth, just to show her who’s boss. What’s Love Got To Do With It doesn’t want its audiences to have any misconceptions about what domestic violence really looks and sounds like. It doesn’t want its audience to mistake what it is: a savage crime, perpetrated repeatedly against a woman who, for all intents and purposes, has nowhere else to go.
I’m sure some people will be inclined to blame Ike’s enraged outbursts on his rapidly increasing cocaine use, but he was always a manipulative and controlling man, guilting Tina into loyalty ever since she was just little Anna Mae Bullock, fresh-faced innocent. Every time he (or her mother, for that matter, played by the exquisite Jenifer Lewis) talks about how Anna Mae’s going to desert him and let him down just like everyone else has, how she just wants to leave him, or that she has a duty to stay with him and their children, my old relationship-PTSD flares up and I nearly have an anxiety attack. Every time. My heart races and my stomach’s in my throat and I pretty much want to crawl in a hole and never come out. Sometimes that constant berating feels like it might be easier to take a blow. It almost certainly would be quicker. I’m not downplaying physical abuse, of course, and I’m certainly not equating my experiences with mostly verbal assaults to that of Tina Turner or to any number of the billions of women across the world who have endured all sorts of horrific abuse, but I know what it feels like to wish for literally anything to spontaneously happen to make it all stop. That’s what abuse can do to a person. It’s a sickness. And this movie exposes it all.
Beautifully, the movie does more to make Ike Turner look awful than to just showcase his diseased and furious mind — it actually makes him look, physically, like a ridiculous fool. Costuming is an aspect of filmmaking that often doesn’t get enough attention for the way it tells and enhances the story being told through dialogue and events. (If you watch Mad Men, I cannot endorse enough the breathtaking, spectacular analysis by fashion bloggers Tom and Lorenzo of the costuming and wardrobe decisions made on that show to underline the plot and influence the tone. It’s a must-read.) In What’s Love Got To Do With It, there is a very telling, nuanced story being told about Ike and Tina through their clothes. When Ike and Tina first meet, Ike is a smooth and put-together leader of a successful rhythm and blues band, and Tina (or Anna Mae, as is still her name then) has sort of awkwardly done herself up to look more mature, more grown. (True story: I have been asking for “Co-cola, please” in the exact manner and intonation Angela Bassett uses in this movie ever since 1993.) As we travel through the sixties, and then the beautiful, crazy, psychedelic seventies, however, Tina looks more and more gorgeous, more and more stylish, more and more flawless and timeless and beautiful, and Ike looks more and more absurd. I’m not kidding. Tina wears these amazing fringe performance dresses, or sleek designer suits as the years go on. Ike, meanwhile, at one point is wearing a belt buckle made of metal hands shaking with a matching choker around his throat. And while Tina’s wigs are basically all in the same vein over the years, varying a little in length or style but not drastically, Ike’s hair goes from big poofy afro to weird slick bob and back again. That’s an intentional distancing of the characters, and it’s one of my favorite examples in all of film how purposeful and thoughtful costuming can strengthen a story.
I do wish What’s Love Got To Do With It had received a little more recognition. Acting nominations are nice and certainly warranted, but the movie itself is powerful for a biopic, and both more effective and more significant than a lot of others that get far more accolades. Sure, it was never going to beat Schindler’s List (nor do I think it should have), but it definitely could’ve benefitted from the increased exposure more nominations (from any awards body, not just the Oscars) could’ve given it — not just monetarily, either. I firmly believe that the more people who see this movie, the more people are willing to talk about and maybe even break free from their experiences with domestic violence. And that, my dears, is critically important — for women and for men, for our present and for our future.
If you are being abused or know someone who is, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at their website or by phone at 1-800-799-7233. They can help.
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