TINA
Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A
There is perhaps no other person more emblematic of resilience than Tina Turner. You don’t have to be the biggest fan of her music to find her story incredibly compelling—her comeback story after escaping a long and abusive relationship with Ike Turner has long been the stuff of legend. But there is so much more to her story, as evidenced by the HBO documentary Tina, which splits her life story into five chapters, only two of which give Ike very direct attention.
And even after it seems Tina Turner’s story has been told over and over, this film provides some new insights, particularly into hardships having nothing to do with her late ex-husband. Born into a family of cotton pickers in rural Tennessee, where she was abandoned by both of her parents. Her experience of trauma and loss has stretched from then clear until very recent years: the closing credits dedicate Tina in part to Craig Turner, her son who died in 2018. No one discusses this in the film’s interviews, and I had to Google it to learn that, at the age of 59, he committed suicide.
It’s easy to forget how old Tina Turner was when she broke into superstardom in the eighties. Tina details how, in the years after her divorce from Ike, she scraped by barely making a living in Las Vegas cabaret shows, capitalizing on the stage name that was literally the only thing she kept in the divorce settlement. When her album Private Dancer became a global smash after its release in 1984—eventually selling five million copies in the U.S. and double that worldwide—she was 44 years old.
In Tina, she talks about how people commonly refer to this mid-eighties success as a “comeback,” but she regards it more as an arrival: she’d had a fairly lengthy music career prior to this, sure, but the success of it was moderate at best; she also released four solo albums in the seventies, the highest-charting single among them reaching #80 on the Billboard chart. In fact, those first four solo albums are apparently so insignificant, Tina doesn’t even bother to mention them, opting instead to discuss only the music she made with Ike. That music was still, after all, comparatively more successful.
But nothing compared to her 1984 breakthrough, in her mid-forties, and her two follow-up albums through the rest of the eighties, while less successful, were enough to help her realize her dream of becoming the first Black woman rock star to sell out stadium venues on tour. By the time she released the hit single “The Best,” she was just shy of 50. And that was in 1989.
That’s right: Tina Turner, as of 2020, is 81 years old. She sits down for an extensive interview for this film, which is later referred to, in combination with the 2019 Broadway show Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, as her “quietly stepping away.” She’s more than earned it. Over time she became understandably tired of fielding questions about Ike, that fact itself becoming part of the story of this film. Here was see Turner come to terms with that experience inevitably being a permanent part of her legacy: “I accept it,” she says. She wrote about it in a best-selling autobiography (co-written by Kurt Loder) published in 1986, somewhat naively thinking it would make people stop asking her about it. The story became even more mainstream in the 1993 film What’s Love Got to Do with It starring Angela Bassett.
One of the more fun things about Tina the documentary film is that the other people who were key in the retelling of these stories are also interview subjects: Kurt Loder, Angela Bassett, even The Tina Turner Musical writer Katori Hall. Others include friend Oprah Winfrey (who accompanied her to the Broadway premiere), her manager Roger Davies, and her younger husband Erwin Bach, the German music executive she began dating in 1986 (when she was 46 and he was 30) and finally married in 2013.
The bulk of Tina’s story in this film, of course, spans the years between when she met Ike Turner in the late fifties and her huge solo success through the late eighties. What few pieces of footage there is between the mid-nineties and the mid-2010s consists mostly of old clips of people, including some of the Turner children and in a few cases Ike himself, commenting on the past already examined. It’s a little jarring to realize a clip from 2000 qualifies as “archival footage.” Ike died in 2007, and we see present-day Tina discussing how she came to be at peace with her past with him.
In any event, I had never paid that close attention to Tina Turner’s music, and didn’t even really catch wind of her abusive past until the 1993 film was released. That doesn’t make her story any less compelling, or her any less extraordinary a person. An observation is made in this film about how diverse in age the audiences were at her arena concerts, from teenagers to people in their sixties, That sort of thing is commonplace among the audiences of many bands and singers now, but at the time it was unheard of. Cher, also in her forties in the eighties, is perhaps an exception, but there was still a clear difference: the ebbs and flows of her career notwithstanding, Cher had long been an established mainstream star. And if anyone’s success story proves the truth that “it’s never too late,” it’s Tina Turner. Who knows how much longer she’ll be with us, but it won’t ever be too late to watch this movie.
An amazing woman with an extraordinary story.
Overall: A-