Bottom line: The early days of blues and rock’n’roll, a rather run-of-the-mill music film spruced up by some terrific performances.
Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 6.5.
The movie is called Cadillac Records. You’ve never heard of the label? Well, the film is based on a real-life company of considerable renown in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But would you rush out to see a movie titled Chess Records?
If the answer to that question is an unstinting yes, then you should see Darnell Martin’s musical drama without hesitation. If you have any doubts, read on.
Actually, there’s a persuasive reason for the film’s title. Several decades ago, well before Detroit began its present disastrous decline, Cadillacs were unparalleled symbols of wealth and prestige, perhaps especially to folks too poor to afford decent housing.
That’s why, when any of Chess Records’ artists achieved their first hit, they would be awarded a brand-new Caddy by label head Leonard Chess. Think of it: Cadillacs were driven by bank presidents and the heads of movie studios. That idea that an indigent former sharecropper could, in segregated America, earn, own and drive one simply for belting a tune he learned in the Delta into a microphone in Chicago – why, that must’ve seemed like a revolution. A revolution with white sidewalls.
And so it was. While most of the well-known movies in this crowded genre deal with the early days of rock’n’roll -- roughly the mid-‘50s to the late ‘60s -- Cadillac Records takes an original tack by starting out a decade earlier. It chronicles how blues music by Southern blacks, recorded and marketed by Northern whites, laid the groundwork for both the sophisticated R&B/soul and the white rock’n’roll that dominated charts and defined American (and British) pop in the subsequent era.
Martin begins her tale the late ‘40s, inter-cutting blues guitarist Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) leaving the farms of Mississippi for the streets of Chicago with Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), an immigrant from Poland, trying his hand at running a music club, then sidling into the record business. When the two meet up, musical history is in the making. One of Muddy’s first recordings, “Rolling Stone,” earns him his Cadillac, and Chess Records is off and running.
We subsequently see the label’s musical family expand to include important artists such as Howlin’ Wolf (Eammon Walker) and Little Walter (Columbus Short) and, later, Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles). About halfway into the movie, however, a new kind of performer comes along. Looking for a crossover artist, Chess - at the behest of Muddy - signs Chuck Berry (Mos Def), a duck-walking, wise-cracking, womanizing character who many people consider a country musician. Berry’s “Maybelline” does more than earn him a Cadillac; it signals the end of “race records” and the advent of the country/R&B fusion that would be rock’n’roll.
I wish I could say Darnell’s film lived up to its title by being a Cadillac of music movies, but it’s more like a Dodge. Several notches below the likes of The Buddy Holly Story, Ray and Walk the Line, it perhaps should have debuted on pay cable rather than in theaters. The main problem is the script: The story has a lot of juice in its early sections, but gradually comes to feel repetitious and meandering in its chronicle of its subjects’ travails with fame, money, drugs, booze, infidelity, and so on. For my money, it also misses some of the menace and allure of early race music, and the searing racial tensions that formed its milieu. Finally, there are some absurd anachronisms, such as Elvis Presley appearing on the scene sometime after we’ve met the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys!
Still, the film has several huge assets in the performances at its center. Jeffrey Wright, one of my favorite actors, is solid and compelling as Muddy Waters. His excellence is matched by the goofy, electric charm of Mos Def as Chuck Berry and searing, poignant Beyoncé as Etta James, while the lesser known Eammon Walker and Columbus Short are terrific as Little Walter, respectively.
