Angela Bassett Gave The Definitive Biopic Performance As Tina Turner In What's Love Got To Do With It
I can't quite believe it, even as I write these words. But at age 83, after a years-long battle with intestinal cancer, Tina Turner has died. Michael, Prince, Bowie, Madonna, Mick Jagger — Turner belonged to an ultra-rarified group of rock and pop gods that's growing smaller as time marches onward, and shows few signs of being replenished by the current music landscape. Arguably the greatest live performer of the 20th century, Tina Turner's long and storied career was marked by meteoric rises, catastrophic falls, and stunning reinventions. She did as much to invent modern rock and roll as Buddy Holly and Little Richard, and still gets half the credit.
Turner released an autobiography in 1986 called "I, Tina." She was only halfway into her career, but had just staged its most important chapter: the zeitgeist-seizing, don't-call-it-a-comeback album of the century, "Private Dancer." The album changed everything for Turner. It completely re-energized her career, which was flagging into nostalgia novelty almost ten years out from her split with Ike, her former collaborator and abusive ex-husband.
On the back of "Private Dancer," Turner went on to sell out Guinness Record-breaking stadium shows, win the first Grammys of her solo career, and launch her foray into film. Appearances in films like "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" and Ken Russell's "Tommy" captured her singular presence beyond just the voice and the moves, but it was another film that didn't even feature Turner in the flesh that immortalized her.
Adapted from "I, Tina," "What's Love Got To Do With It" reset the standard by which music biopics would be made. It had the music. It had the signature Tina Turner look. But it wouldn't have become such a prominent fixture in both Turner's career and film history without the astonishing central performance from Angela Bassett.
Close, but not a match
If "What's Love Got To Do With It" is the definitive musician biopic, it's because Bassett gave the definitive biopic performance as Tina Turner. If you watch the film today with Tina and her various Turner-isms in mind, you might experience some whiplash. Wisely, Bassett seemed to understand from the start that a stage and screen presence as idiosyncratic, highly identifiable, and utterly intense as Turner's couldn't be replicated. So why try?
Among the great actors of her generation, Bassett is one who you could say has her own idiosyncratic, intense, highly identifiable style. The rigid jaw, the stammering exclamations, the balletic physicality, magnanimous laugh, and ability to make any inconsequential line of dialogue sound like it's coming from Hamlet — those are Bassett's trademarks, and they differ starkly from Turner's. Her stage presence is so unique and so invigorating it almost can't be described. Her unpredictable kicks and spins, campy ha-cha-cha jaw rolls, alternation between staccato spoken word and booming vibrato belting, wordless, almost spiritual synchronization with her background dancers, and the limitless energy she relentlessly burns through. The differences are so great they virtually eclipse the similarities.
But Bassett seemed to understand the uncanny valley one can fall into when portraying real famous people: Get too close and all anyone will see are the slight failures to conform, but stay too far away and they'll dismiss your performance whole cloth as disrespectful editorializing. Bassett went through rigorous movement and vocal coaching to become Turner, even being coached by Turner herself. But by strategically diverting in certain respects, she created a performance that stands on its own two feet while honoring Turner's inherent incomparability.
Simply the best
In the performance scenes depicting Turner-isms that had already been caught on camera hundreds of times, you can see Bassett mirroring Turner's facial and body tics. Take her performance of "Disco Inferno." If you had to motion illustrate Tina Turner from memory, everything you'd think of is there: the Bob Mackie-style deep-V beaded gown, the windmill arms and shoulders hunching on beat, the way Turner would tap her head with the base of her palm, most of all, the way she doesn't try to hide the physical exertion of her own performance.
But in the less flashy scenes, especially in the traumatic ones depicting the abuse Turner suffered at the hands of the truly monstrous Ike, Bassett allows her own distinct presence to rise up and command the action. There is a heartbreaking scene where Turner flees from Ike's room after a brutal beating and asks for her own room at a neighboring hotel, covered in fresh blood and bruises. "I'm Tina Turner," Bassett says, "I'm supposed to open the Academy tonight. I have 36 cents and a Mobil card, but if you give me a room, I swear I will pay you back."
The emotional composition of Bassett's delivery is achingly complex. Shame is shaded over by the stubborn rejection of pride: why should I be ashamed of what someone else has done to me? And yet, you feel the embarrassment radiating off of Bassett, whose voice wavers and drops even as she holds firm and maintains eye contact. The layering is all Bassett, which makes the delivery of "I'm Tina Turner" even more authentic and earned.
Nobody else was or ever will be Tina Turner. But in "What's Love Got To Do With It," Angela Bassett gave us a performance that will live on forever.