What's Love Got to Do with It. - movie reviews

National Review, July 19, 1993 by John Simon

* "Lives there a body so myopic / To put his faith in a biopic?" If I were a rock lyric-writer and if myopic and biopic rhymed, this is how I'd start my review of What's Love Got to Do with It, a seven-word title in search of a question mark. I guess the absence of that desiderated question mark is meant to alert us to this being no highfalutin film observing the rules of honky usage, but the funky lowdown on the low-down, raunchy Ike and Tina Turner, no punctuation attached, and no punches pulled.

Of course, it isn't. Still, there are now several sides to the story. There is the book I, Tina, as told by Tina Turner to Kurt Loder, in which, for example, Ike stubs out his cigarette on Tina's lips. Then there is the Ike Turner recension, to be found in the pages of Vanity Fair: "I didn't hit her any more than you been hit by your guy!" Finally, there is the Disney version, the new movie with a screenplay by Kate Lanier, vaguely based on I, Tina. Here Tina falls instantly in love with Ike (instead of first getting pregnant by one of his band members), endures rape and beatings by Ike during their marriage (but no scalding coffee tossed in her face), and is saved eventually by her conversion to Buddhism, though what reiterating a Buddhist chant has to do with summoning up the nerve to walk out on Ike remains, like so much else, unclear.

Personally, I have scant use for rock |n' roll, and have caught Tina, Ike, and the Ikettes only a couple of times on TV. But I am willing to believe that the movie has every bit as much surface authenticity as Jurassic Park. Those prancing human dynamos look as real as Spielberg's dinos, and they certainly move with the same aweinspiring dynamism. The songs, too, are there in profusion, as recorded or re-recorded by Mrs. Turner, and Angela Bassett--sexy woman, fine actress, zealous impersonator--does a terrific job of dancing, lip-synching, and impersonating. She may be better-looking than the real-life Tina Turner, but that hardly hurts.

As Ike, Larry Fishburne--who, for this picture, became Laurence Fishburne--does a bang-up job acting, making makebelieve music, and banging up his patiently suffering Trilby. Why did he change his name? If Laurence Olivier eventually became Larry to his fans, the Disney people may have deemed the reverse itinerary equally prestigious. Good as Angela Bassett is, Fishburne may be even more riveting, and though the movie does not stint on his lesser offenses--womanizing, wife--beating, coke-snorting--it considerately avoids those that landed the real-life Ike in jail.

Kate Lanier was probably the ideal choice for screenwriter. A black Vassar graduate who studied writing and theater, she became an actress and sold three other screenplays to Hollywood, whither she soon moved, winning several awards for her starring role in That Burning Question, which I somehow managed to miss. Doug Chapin, coproducer of What's Love Got to Do with It, explains that Tina Turner is at once "powerful, sexual, and motherly," which, as he quaintly puts it, "Begs the question, |What happened that made her this way?'" Miss Lanier duly delivered the properly question-begging (and question-mark-begging) script, matching Mr. Chapin's literacy with her own: "We really clicked on the idea that Tina's story is like a heroic myth." And who doesn't know that a myth is as good as a mile?

There are incidental pleasures in this movie version as it evolved from Tina to Kurt to Kate to Walt (who is surely no more dead than Elvis). Alas, the best scene is right at the beginning, when little Anna Mae Bullock (Tina as a tot) is thrown out of church choir practice by the choirmistress for her uncontrolled gyrations during hymn-singing. Young Anna Mae is played delectably by Rae'ven Kelly (could that thing between the e and the v be the fugitive question mark disguised as an apostrophe?), and when the big church door closes behind that teeny figure, Brian Gibson, the British director, catches something primordial, as he does sporadically later on as well.

Personally, I would have enjoyed seeing Tina's current life in Cologne with her lover of six years, Erwin Bach, the managing director of EMI records in Germany. But that may come in the sequel, which, like Jurassic Park, Tina may yet garner. What's Love Got to Do with It has much in common with the dinosaur movie, not least its music director's revelation about the editing or stretching of the musical numbers with "digital technology never before used on a movie set." So cheer up: art may be languishing in Hollywood, but technology bravely marches on.