Chess Records was one of a handful of independent record labels that changed the sound of music-and the course of the world-in the 1940s and '50s. Cadillac Records is the fictionalized but mostly fact based dramatization of that label, organized primarily as a tale of two lives, the company' signature bluesman Muddy Waters and its owner, Leonard Chess.
Co-owner would be more accurate and there lies the film's challenge. Leonard's real life brother and partner, Phil, is ignored by Cadillac Records. By trimming the seminal Chicago label and its roster of important blues and rock 'n' roll artists to fit a simpler chronicle, director-writer Darnell Martin's chronology occasionally falls outside the timeline of reality. The sequence of events surrounding the trumped up arrest of Chuck Berry and his decline into embittered cynicism is wrong; other anachronisms creep into the story.
But in balance, Cadillac Records summarizes most of the key themes about Chess into a series of mythic episodes. The richness of history is both diminished and heightened. Like an intro course in Western Civilization taught by an instructor eager to impress his students on the importance of his lessons, Cadillac Records presents an enthusiastically highlighted panorama of important names and events. Hope is: it will stimulate the interest of those who want to learn more.
Looked at that way, the movie gets it more right than wrong. Jeffrey Wright (who plays Collin Powell in W.) stars as Muddy Waters, the Mississippi sharecropper who glimpsed another world when roving folklorist Alan Lomax came to Stovall Plantation to record him for the Library of Congress archives. Cadillac Records follows Waters to the Chicago streets, where his music was lost against the sound of the city's honking cars and rattling elevated trains; shows him responding by playing loud electric blues; puts him in the Chess Studio, where Leonard pushed the needle into red in pursuit of the new sonic possibilities of amplification. Cadillac Records shows that the best Chess releases had presence. They were often little aural worlds of menace and mystery, drenched in dark shadows of reverb. Even if most white American kids were oblivious at the time, they would soon absorb the Chess legacy through the efforts of white English kids like the Rolling Stones who adored the label.
Adrien Brody plays Leonard Chess as the wily Jewish immigrant who owned the South Side corner bar where blues bands played. He rewards the recording artists he discovered at his club with Cadillacs, the trophy of success for all Americans in those years, but kept their royalties for himself. He worked hard, driving from station to station persuading DJs to play Chess recordings with the help of his three travel companions: Johnny Walker, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. No bribery, no airplay. Refreshingly, Leonard is not depicted as a secular saint but a man of many sides. Devoted and devious, he was into the music and the money.
The cast is likable but the shoes they wear for the roles they play are hard to fill. One suspects that the bedroom-eyed Brody is a softer touch than the real Leonard Chess. The taciturn Wright falls short of the moonfaced gravity of Muddy Waters. Rapper Mos Def is plain daft as Chuck Berry, lacking the great performer's agility and slyness. Surprisingly, the pretty vacant Beyonce rises high as the soulful dynamo Etta James. And British actor Eamonn Walker is unforgettable as blues singer Howlin' Wolf, turning the sullen giant into a figure scary enough to stare down the devil.
