More a mosaic of a time and place than a bio-pic, and perhaps all the better for it, Cadillac Records offers vivid, portrait-like studies of some of modern music’s gods: Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Little Walter (Columbus Short), Howlin’ Wolf (Eammon Walker), Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), Etta James (Beyonce Knowles), and Chuck Berry (Mos Def), the troubled, stratospherically talented stable of Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), former junkman and shifty captain for this ruined band.
Chess, a complex figure, wheels and deals, corrals his wayward talents, giving them both a space to work and live in, whilst apportioning out their money in less than ethical fashion, playing the angles with the same dexterity Waters plays his guitar with. It’s a tough little world they’re involved in: Walter’s nine-tenths crazy, and doesn’t mind putting a cap in anyone who pisses him off; the awesome Wolf enforces his bandleader authority with a gangster’s methods; and Chess receives casual beatings from Chicago Southsiders resentful of his suzerainty over his label’s black artists.
Records has no pretence to building a neat narrative out of a fracas of powerful personalities, each with a particular psychodrama to enact; like Chess’s car when he suffers a fatal heart attack driving away from his beloved studio, it trundles to a gentle standstill, still gripped by the joyful talent uncovered within its fearsome clan. The film looks rather at the interaction of races, of money and art, and family and workplace.
Both Waters and Chess define the people drawn to them as family, and like any family, some members screw each-other, some members hate each-other, and some members remain through a powerful half-sensed bond. All the core protagonists are tortured by barely suppressed resentments and outrage at their place in the scheme of things, even, ironically, as their cultural vigour begins to reinvent that culture. Even the heretofore level-headed Chess falls under the spell of the damaged, smack-addicted, but volcanically emotive James, and the act of trying to leave both her and the studio behind literally breaks his heart.
Wright adds another of his sublimely etched characterisations to his CV, and Def is a surprisingly lithe and spirited
Director Darnell Martin insinuates her way within the setting and the people with grace, and offers its music with real affection and interest in performance. Whilst it’s no earth-shaking piece of cinema, it’s a fine, and very entertaining, film.