Cadillac Records should be a better film. The story of the rise and fall of Chess Records is the stuff of music legend. The label, own by Leonard and Phil Chess, once held the greatest collection of blues talent ever assembled. At one point Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, and Chuck Barry were all counted amongst it's roster. For a die hard like me, Cadillac Records is a helluva lot of fun. But a subpar script combined with a lack of narrative focus derail what could've been a great film about one of the most interesting times in music history.
Adrien Brody and his nose plays Leonard Chess, a Jewish born club owner in the southside of Chicago. In the 1940s, it was rare to see a Jewish guy pushing an all-black nightclub, but Leonard was a guy who saw opportunity more than he saw race. Or atleast he didn't care about race as long as it came with a dollar value. Leonard, as fate would have it, would meet up with legendary guitarist and bluesman Muddy Waters in his nightclub. Muddy, a former sharecropper with a unique voice and a penchant for the ladies, reluctantly signs on to Leonard's Chess Records label along with troubled harmonica player, Little Walter.
Cadillac mainly focuses on the troubles of these three men, and that might be where the film goes wrong. It does a great job of capturing the sleazy cool feel of the 1940s and '50s. It was a time of gangsters, fast women, sweaty brows and everybody with a gun in their waistband. However, the tales of Chess, Waters, and Walter are more than enough to fill their own movies. Trying to cram the lives of these three legends into one film just leaves too much left unexplored. And let's not forget the sordid lives of Chucky Berry and Etta James, too. There simply isn't enough time to work everything out, and the film suffers for it.
Leonard probably gets the most thorough examination of them all. Brody plays him as a guy who is loyal almost to a fault to the people who helped build his enterprise, to the point of risking his own family's welfare. His relationship with Muddy is unique as it's more brotherly than employer/employee, although it's telling that in the early stages it was Muddy who always drove Chess around. That could've been due more to the race relations inherent in the southern cities they traveled through, especially in Mississippi, but I could've done with a more complete look at how these two dealt with such open racial hostility. It falls upon Leonard to manage this increasingly large stable of larger than life figures in a world that is more than eager to see them laid low. Threats loom around every corner it seems, from the fundamentalists who believed blues music and by extension rock 'n roll was the devil's music, to the racist cops on the street busting heads for minor offenses. But the biggest threat to Chess Records' success remained their own personal demons within.
Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters does his usual amazing job portraying Muddy as a flawed man, both fully embracing the perks of his celebrity(perhaps too much) while also seeming a bit uncomfortable with his newly created image. Mos Def does a decent job as Chuck Berry, but I'm starting to get the feeling that Mos is still learning to play people with unique characteristics. It's like he's trying too hard to mimick, rather than making the character his own. He was almost comically bad in 16 Blocks, and his performance in Be Kind Rewind while decent, was skeptical at points. The surprise for me, though, was Beyonce as Etta James. It goes without saying that the powerful Knowles held up her end during the musical number("At Last" is particularly moving), but she also showed surprising depth playing the feisty performer. I still have my doubts about her ability to carry the lead in a film, but she showed me that she does have more talent than I was willing to admit before.
I gotta admit to being disappointed, but my expectations were unusally high for this. In fairness, if you are a fan of this time like I am you will probably be able to look beyond all the script problems and have fun with it. You'll nitpick the stretching of facts and bemoan the fact that this material deserves a true accounting on the big screen, but you'll forgive it because everybody is so authentic and the music so hot. I'm not sure it's for everybody, but it's definitely for people who have an appreciation of the blues and origins of rock 'n roll.
