Cadillac Records
Part biopic, part anti-racism flick, part mid-twentieth-century history lesson, part musical. That’s Cadillac Records in a nutshell. Well, in a few nutshells. It’s also part good movie. Just so you know.
In the 40’s and 50’s, black singers started to create Blues music, with guitars, a few harmonicas, some drums, and lot of soul. Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) started in the fields of Mississippi and ended up a music star. Little Walter (Colombus Short) started in an alley with a harmonica and became Muddy’s sidekick. Howlin’ Wolf (Eammon Walker) shows up out of nowhere with a beat-up 1940 P.O.S. truck and creates his own style of blues. Chuck Berry (Mos Def) takes blues and makes it country and makes himself rich and famous. And Etta James (Beyonce Knowles) creates the female blues and a new lifestyle for a black female musician. Their producer, Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody), is one thing they all have in common: he gave them their start, their shot at making music history. And all of these people, in one way or another, also lived the blues, and that is the story this film tells.
A teacher I had in high school once told us that if you want to know a culture, listen to its music. In a way, that is what this movie also tells us, and it gives us the ability to actually watch it, too. One of the aspects of the African American blues movement in the middle of the twentieth century that this movie highlights is that the man who really started it all was white. He let them play their music, and he made them family. The blues that each of the men (and Etta eventually) brought with them, their baggage, was a huge load for any one person to carry, and Chess kind of did just that. He seemed to carry all of the aspirations of the black community on his shoulders as well as the actual hopes and fears of each of the men and women he worked with, that he helped to produce – literally.
As we watch the film progress and time move forward, the music becomes all too familiar, and the faces and names that came out of Chess Records at their beginning are people that have become cultural icons, faces of America in the 20th century, like the Rolling Stones. Their music comes out of this black blues scene, created by Chess and Muddy Waters and culminating in the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll with Elvis and the Beach Boys in the 50’s and into the early 60’s. This movie is as much a history lesson as it is an entertaining musical, with each of the songs telling the story of the man who wrote it, many of those by the narrator, Willie Dixon, played by Cedric the Entertainer.
The acting in this movie is very good. Wright and Brody are a fantastic pair, and the supporting cast, most of whom I have mentioned (also including Gabrielle Union) is really quite good. The script is fitting for the film, I thought, and the directing is simple and tells the story of the music pretty well. At the beginning, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to like this film, because the plot develops at the speed of light, from fields in Mississippi to the streets and then studio in Chicago, I wasn’t sure it knew how to pace itself. But the pacing levels off about forty-five minutes in and from there stays pretty consistent.
I liked this movie, but I didn’t love it. It’s a solid and pretty enjoyable movie and one that also reminds the public again of where we have come from. I don’t just mean the vehement racism of the past, but also the cultural significance of music, of music that tells stories and that bleeds from certain artists. Cadillac Records, for all it tries to do, does tell an important story: the story of music in American, and how a certain group of African Americans developed an artistic style in the midst of segregation that still echoes to this day, which is a reminder that some of the greatest artistic triumphs have come out of extreme circumstances. I won’t promise that you’ll like it, because I can see how it might be a little bit of an acquired taste, but I do think it’s at least worth a shot. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is: put it on your Netflix queue, because it’s good, but it can definitely wait.
Rating: 2.5/4 Stars
