Movie formulas can be fun, but it’s healthy to occasionally remind ourselves (as we did a few days ago) that many of them promote lifestyles not all that dissimilar from the subliminal messages in John Carpenter’s They Live. The rags-to-riches, making-of-a musician/painter/filmmaker/disgruntled genius pictures have an obvious appeal – they normally invite us to share the experience of a person, whom we already enjoy in real life, who started out as us and ended up as them. The films theoretically humanize the artist, and indirectly imply hope for us too: to transcend lives that many of us find lackluster and notably wanting in money. The pictures offer vicarious tours of fame and fortune, but there is usually an insidious puritanical streak – these films boil the artists down, promoting them to miniature Gods – using them as mascots actively promoting “good behavior”, essentially telling us to marry up, procreate, take the job and sit down. The artists, who live, live because they somehow tamed their wild-child ways (the wildness’s relation to the art always down played), and the artists who don’t, normally die. We’re invited to enjoy the musicians’ and painters’ and filmmakers’ bed hopping, drinking and drugging, but we can pat ourselves on the back too, for watching a movie that was probably nominated for an Oscar, and for accepting that the artist eventually put that nonsense away and assumed rank as a productive member of society, or…didn’t.
Cadillac Records has a few pat, prepackaged, tendencies inherited from the genre: the usual short-cutting of the significant others on the periphery of the musicians’ struggles, plantation/poverty scenes that are too movie-beautiful: muting the pain that helped to fuel the blues/rock emergence, etc.; but the picture is still a triumph, uneven, but lively and human. Writer-director Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That) is open and blessed with common sense, she doesn’t see in the musician film an opportunity to scold and rap us on the knuckles. Martin’s picture begins with a songwriter, played by Cedric the Entertainer, telling the stories of Chess Records, which will help launch Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, etc, etc. I usually find the “in the good ‘ol days” framing to be a bit much (this reverence has killed more than one John Sayles movie), but the opening here reveals itself to fit Cadillac Records naturally, fully – the picture is in love with story, at story’s mercy, it jives and zigzags as the story of a gifted drunk on a barstool might. The picture, in its rapture with pure story, its love of character, also hints at the honest nature of how we, particularly the very talented, create art, and how the creation/consumption of art nurtures us.
The pain and uncertainty that partially drives people to create is rarely resolved (if you’ll allow me this projection) by actually creating anything – at best the ache is temporarily sated; if it was to ever be fully conquered then the art would most likely cease or stagnate (this can possibly explain the traditional drying of successful filmmakers’ creative wells). Cadillac Records, excluding a few poor scenes, gets at the creation of the music as equal parts commerce, luck, lark, savvy, and talent – that these legends became legends in a matter of fact kind of way (this is underlined at the film’s end, with Muddy’s moving surprise at his being invited to play in England – he’s transcended himself – unknowingly). Martin essentially says, and this is usually particularly uncomfortable for filmmakers to confront, that great art is partially fortuitous – a collision of commerce and emotional projection. The Hollywood denial of this principle explains why so many movies are so bad – why many, especially young, filmmakers are trying to will their films into the realm of art, for its own sake, divorced of anything else such as subtext or personal expression and need – the only need expressed in many films these days is to make money or be seen as the next Stanley Kubrick (for most young directors, the man to emulate is always Kubrick or Scorsese – they aren’t interested in airier approaches, filmmakers whose movies don’t as readily announce themselves as having been “directed”) .
Free of the cheating-in-retrospect judgment that limited Ray and Walk the Line, which, on their terms, are shrewdly, too shrewdly, worked out entertainments, the actors of Cadillac Records are allowed a rarely-experienced-in-pop-film freedom – this is the most impressively and confidently performed picture of 2008. Adrien Brody has the ironic, sometimes huckster sex appeal that he had in King of the Hill, Summer of Sam and The Darjeeling Limited, and this performance has the implied need, the invigorating in-the-moment quality, of his work in The Pianist. Beyoncé Knowles is wrong for Etta James, James had the haunted force of a woman who’d felt the pain she sang of, Knowles is too composed, too contemporary, too clearly adored and rich; and the miscasting and limitations of conception of character don’t do her any favors (they do James the way Introducing Dorothy Dandridge did Dandridge – give her one overriding Rosebud that explains everything – in both cases an inferiority complex to a white father) – but she still has a real, rare chemistry with Brody – the new white man with the money who might treat her as a whore like all the others. (There’s a wonderful moment between them in a pool room, a moment that recalls the one good scene, also in a pool room, in Talk to Me). As a stand-in for Diana Ross in Dreamgirls, Knowles was stranded – a mannequin; and though her performance as James isn’t right, it proves that Knowles is a canny performer – she can’t play James but she sure as hell can play Beyoncé Knowles, and that isn’t the qualified praise it may sound to be. She is a star.
Jeffrey Wright is Muddy Waters, and while the film is structurally about the working/tentatively personal relationship between him and Brody’s Leonard Chess, that’s really the spine for stand-alone, spin-off vignettes with the other performers – the picture’s refusal to settle into any one three-act setup is partially why it’s so striking an entertainment. Wright is commandingly aloof; he does Waters justice by forcing you to come to him without making a show of forcing you to come to him – he hints at all the stories with which a feature film can’t hope to include. Muddy’s relationship with his lover, Geneva (Gabrielle Union) rebukes the offensive domestic simplifications in Walk the Line. When Muddy’s infidelities are thrown in Geneva’s face by the unhinged Little Walter, in a bid to have her himself; her reaction doesn’t allow for quick/easy moral digestion – she’s strong and self-imprisoning.
Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf are the pictures showiest roles, their scenes have an electricity and ambivalence reminiscent of certain moments in Mean Streets – and Columbus Short and Eamonn Walker roll with them. Little Walter has a funny-terrifying scene early on with an imitator that casts a pall over the entire film – dissolving any potential Awards glaze. Walter and Wolf are Tasmanian devils of unchecked ego – the latter possibly even more dangerous for his slickness and entitled sleight of hand (he has a bit in the studio with a band mate that, in its way, is as scary as anything Little Walter does or tries). These men have monstrous tendencies, but Short, Walker and Martin never signal them as monsters – they’re thrilling unprocessed, part of the day-to-day fabric of this way of life.
Filmmakers have been wasting the captivating, inside-himself poetry of Mos Def for several years now, so it seems perversely right that he play Chuck Berry – a legend never fully allowed his due. Def’s Berry isn’t much of the movie’s (lean) running time, but he paints the picture’s human commerce-art themes most vividly. Berry’s resentment and tucking away linger, we miss him and his sideways jokes and his womanizing, and the squandering of this role is allowed to equivocate, without effort, the hampering of Berry’s own talent.
We’ve all complained of lazy biographies that get our stars wrong while pandering to our stupidest secret desires that everything figure out tangibly in the end. Martin has made the rare biopic that’s curious; she revels in the right aspects of pop filmmaking – the accessibility, the polish, the compulsive interest in story – and abandons most of what has become thoughtlessly corrupt. Cadillac Records isn’t sentimental because Martin has the sense and insight to acknowledge that the creation of art is not all in the name of self-actualization. Most filmmakers, the filmmakers of Ray and Walk the Line included, use art as the MacGuffin in a caterpillar/butterfly scenario – Martin doesn’t condescend, to us or to her amazing subjects – art is also a means to an end, a way to hopefully scrounge some extra cash on the side, to buy bread or booze, to get laid, maybe even get the artists out of the traditionally thankless, awful jobs they’re trapped in. Martin acknowledges the real practicalities, but also sees that the music had to have been created, as a natural reaction to the action – a release of the toxicity that was building in these men and women from the poverty and extraordinary racism and their own imperfections. Cadillac Records ends; and not one musician is traditionally “redeemed” in a conventional sense, they’re all dramatically redeemed, they’re allowed spark and contradiction, they’re allowed to be bastards. The singers and songwriters and producers of Chess Records, these men and women who’d create some of the most enduring American music of all time, while in the grips of lovers and drugs and violence and self-consciousness and greed, are more exhilarating and encouraging than the usual fantasies – the picture suggests what other films pretend to – that everyone is wrestling the same blood urges.
