Despite Clichéd Aesthetics, ‘Tina’ Is An Emotionally Potent Documentary [Berlin Review]

The latest from T.J.Martin and Daniel Lindsay, directors of “Undefeated” and “LA 92,” “TINA” looks like another documentary that came off of a factory line, complete with the usual panning shots of contact sheets, dramatic zooms into rolling tapes, cross-cutting between audio interviews and their published print versions, melodramatic score cues doing their best to emulate Philip Glass. But for the most part, the film still feels powerful despite those pedestrian stylistic leanings, purely because of its constant centering of Tina Turner’s voice in the telling of her story, always comes back to the story of the Queen of Rock n’ Roll,  “the woman who taught Mick Jagger to dance,” as told in her own words. At least Martin and Lindsay don’t do the star the disservice of stereotyping her nor sensationalizing the worst parts of her life in the same way so many have before.

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Interviewees note the irony of Tina wanting to tell her own story so she can leave it behind her, only for it to become a focal point of discussion around her stardom, and it’s disconcerting to witness how cruel and apathetic the TV interviews become in their morbid obsession over her past marriage. The film takes note of how Ike Turner exploited her from the very beginning, showing how he capitalized on her talent throughout that first section. The film at least avoids its sensationalist tendencies when exploring how the abusive relationship intertwined with her early career in music and the predatory nature of the music industry toward young women – especially black women. It doesn’t eschew the growing complications of her past association with Ike – not to say that documentary should always be in service of its subject.

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Still, the film’s operation as closure is undeniably powerful. It feels relatively striking to have the details of her life illustrated in her own words with her own hindsight, finally exerting control over a narrative that was treated with morbid sensationalism. Here, Turner puts her desire to move on as serenely as this: “I don’t like to pull out old clothes.” 

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Even outside of her involvement, there’s fascinating interview access with family members, her managers, contemporaries, and fellow artists. There’s even Angela Bassett, who famously played the part of Turner in the biopic “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” here seen as something of a sore point as it coincides with the singer finally getting fed up with the story always coming back to Ike, always seeking out the sensationalist angle on the most horrible part of her life. The directors don’t quite go into her influence over the course of music history, framed more around her personal journey, the state of music as context to her career path. Neither is it entirely dictated as a step-by-step chronological illustration of her life, segmented by theme through straightforwardly titled chapters (“Part 1: Tina & Ike” or “Part 2: Family,” or “Part 3: Comeback”, and so on). Beyond a quick reference to her part in “Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome,” the film’s main interactions with Hollywood are mostly focused around “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” with which this film feels somewhat in contention (there’s plenty of archive footage displaying her being visibly fed up with the lines of questioning that the film opened up). 

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What the directors lack in imagination they at least make up for in emotivity – the latter half of the film undeniably powerful in its arrangement and exploration of the singer’s reclamation of her life and the story around it. Its occasional slips into sensationalism through its editing and the choices in how it pieces together its footage finally begins to compliment the film in its latter half, formed around Tina Turner’s reforging of her image into that of a bonafide rock star. In this stage, her performances take a little more control over the course of the narrative– one of the most poignant moments of the whole film simply being the image of her performing a new song to a completely packed stadium, in a realization of her dream to become a rock star and do that very thing.

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The moment itself lets that image do the work implicitly rather than explicitly make the connection. It’s infinitely more fascinating as a personal exorcism of old demons than as a piece of documentary filmmaking. That said, despite its cliched stylings, it succeeds through its intimacy and emotionality, as well as the smart arrangement of its footage. [B]

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