Re: [Harp-L] Review of Cadillac Records Movie
Reads pretty even-handedly to someone who hasn't seen the movie. (Wonder
if it'll get general release in Oz?..maybe not)
When it comes to music as subject matter for film, I prefer straight
fiction. A great example of this is 'Payday', written by Don Carpenter
and directed by Daryl Duke, starring Rip Torn. No biopic could get to
the heart of post-war country music the way this one does; the music, by
the way, is incidental.
RD
>>> <venkyr@xxxxxxx> 18/12/2008 21:42 >>>
------------------------------------------------
Featured Blues Review 2 of 3
Cadillac Records
(Sony Pictures, 2008)
Written and directed by Darnell Martin
This film is infuriating. It leaves out an
entire Chess brother. It supports the myth
that the Chess studio was always at the final
2120 South Michigan Avenue location, and
manages to suggest South Michigan Avenue is
little more than a narrow alley. It wasnât
and isnât.
This movie conflates early Elvis and the 1968
death of Little Walter (among other things)
into a single montage. The musicians werenât
just paid in Cadillacs and spending money,
though there is an important truth in that; it
took years of legal fighting to straighten out
the books, to get some financial justice for
some of the Chess artists. If casual blues
fans take their blues history from this film,
blues history is set backâagain.
And, of course it gets worse. The golden-hued
cotton fields of the delta are filmic pixie
dust. Muddy and Walter were not so tight for
so long; indeed, Walter walked off a Muddy
tour to form his own band. Jeffrey Wrightâs
Muddy Waters is an awfully earnest fellow, as
in so many bio-pic type movies, a
one-dimensional man. If you donât get the
flow, the humor, the sociality, the nobility,
the vanity, the sensuality of Muddy Waters,
you donât really have him at all. Some
critics have suggested that Beyoncà Knowles
should get an Academy Award nomination for her
anguished, blowsy, falling down, stoned take
on Etta James. Bracket the acting, and whether
or not it is bathetic, James deserves to have
a second and third thought in her head, and we
are ourselves no brain media monkeys if we
accept this version of her as authoritative.
Who and what gets left out and foreshortened
in this movie is breathtaking.
Still, if you love the blues, if you have
spent some of your life in the times and
places of this movie or only visiting them in
hours of listening and learning and reflection
and whimsy, you should see Cadillac Records.
When the pistol goes into the guitar case, the
blues is punctuated like the rim shot off the
snare. When Walter rolls up in the Caddy with
the doors off, the edginess of the whole
enterprise is underlined like a bright
harmonica squeal. If you get from Cadillac
Records the permeable boundary between money,
a little money, and no money at all, if you
pick up the way that twists the art and the
artist, you should have a better handle about
who is playing at your blues festival this
year and what is making them tick.
I donât trust the old story, the
commonplace, that the American kids of the
1950s, victims of sexual inhibition, cultural
constipation, and political stupefaction, were
in musical hibernation waiting to be
negrified-urbanized-electrified-emotionalized;
and when it arrived it overwhelmed the young
and the old, the unspeakable truth spoken, the
horror of social chaos turned loose, a new
market thrown open for business. The fact is,
there were always interesting, challenging,
de-sublimating things going on in American
music and culture. But Cadillac Records needs
this commonplace to get its story over onto
the arc of fame and fortune. If you are paying
attention to the movie, Cadillac Records is a
narrative of more basic human exuberance,
weakness, genius, frustration, luck, and
hustle. That seems truer to me to the world I
live in than a tale of the perils of wealth
and celebrity, courted, won, lost, and
realized.
With all of its omissions and exaggerations,
this film probably estimates the right size,
the modest but important size, of Chicagoâs
Chess in shaping our popular cultural world,
and doing so tells a story of only very
slightly larger than life human beings. I was
infuriated and engrossed by this telling.
Review by Dale Clark
www.myspace.com/harpdad
This archive was generated by a fusion of
Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and
MHonArc 2.6.8.