News

Cadillac Records

• Written and directed by Darnell Martin
• Starring Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé Knowles, Eamonn Walker, Mos Def, Columbus Short and Cedric the Entertainer
• Classification: 18A
• 

The story of how the blues electrified Chicago (and vice versa), Cadillac Records sometimes feels like an overresearched magazine article. Too often we're being informed rather than entertained. Still, anyone who likes pop music or wonders how bands like the Rolling Stones got rolling will enjoy the ride.

And if nothing else, the inventive account of Chess Records confirms that Hollywood myth often makes for a better story than what actually happened.

Chess Records was founded after the Second World War by music lovers/businessmen Leonard and Phil Chess. The brothers loved what was called race music, and their first great achievement was allowing a local musician, Muddy Waters, to be himself. The Hoochie Coochie Man brought sex and electricity to the blues. The latter came courtesy of an uncle who gave Muddy an amplified guitar to penetrate the din at juke joints.

Director Darnell Martin's version of how the blues went electric is way better: Muddy (Jeffrey Wright) is working a bustling street corner, attracting little attention, save the admiring glances of a woman in a tenement window. She invites the guitarist upstairs with a smile. Waters later returns to the street. Seeing his continued struggles, his sated admirer throws him an extension cord.

And when Muddy plays his suddenly electrified instrument, which is presumably plugged into his lover's still-humming body, he emits a cry so loud and pure it sets Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton rollin' and tumblin' in cribs as far away as Seattle and Surrey.

More fibs that greatly enhance Cadillac Records: Leonard and Phil Chess are, in reality, drab workaholics. Bald and wide-waisted, Len is old at 35. He is empathetic, however; a shoulder to cry on for Etta James, an erratic, fabulously talented singer who bears an unfortunate resemblance to her rumoured father, pool hustler Minnesota Fats.

In the movie, however, there is no Phil Chess, just Len, played by Adrien Brody as a swivel-hipped seducer who, after a brief, fiery romance, beds his most difficult protégé (lush, gorgeous Beyoncé).

There is poetic truth to filmmaker Martin's invented romance. The most intriguing aspect of Leonard Chess was the hyphen connecting music lover and businessman. The producer loved and exploited the stars he made popular; greatly aiding their careers even as he ripped them off. A greedy, tormented affair proves a useful battlefield to explore his contradictory impulses. And though Beyoncé sure doesn't look like James, or Brody, Chess, they are, together, as dangerously exciting as the music they lived.

The musical impersonations are half the kick of Cadillac Records, which is as it should be. Beyoncé is sexed up and famished in a way she has never been on screen. And Eamonn Walker gets Howlin' Wolf's lupine ferocity. Best of all is Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters.

Waters resembled a black Cherokee with a prize fighter's build; an appearance made more startling by a two-storey Elvis pompadour and dapper Thirties matinee-idol mustache. On stage, he was a coiled cobra that hypnotized women, scaring men off the dance floor.

Wright captures Waters's wary intelligence and menacing calm. One great scene has him greeting the Rolling Stones outside Chess studios. Muddy pretends to be a porter, grabbing their belongings. But the amused half-smile on his face tells another story: Though he's toting their expensive equipment, Muddy knows the Stones can't carry the tube of his slide guitar.

There are disappointments, as mentioned. A story can be told in whole without labouring through every particular. Martin includes too much storyline. We don't need to see young Muddy in Mississippi, picking both cotton and guitar. Cedric the Entertainer's narration is extraneous. And Mos Def mos' definitely can't do Chuck Berry onstage.

That said, Cadillac Records (so named because Chess paid his stars in automobiles) gets enough miles to the gallon to explain how electrified blues set the world reeling and rocking.

Special to The Globe and Mail

The tracks are sound

With the release of Cadillac Records — a biopic of Leonard Chess — also comes a soundtrack, complete with Beyoncé's renderings of the torchy At Last, sung by Etta James in 1960.

Beyoncé wears James's blond wig well, but does her singing match up?

Comparisons are made easy with the concurrent release of The Best of Chess Records, a CD featuring the original recordings of Chicago blues and prototypical rock found in Cadillac Records. Listening to versions side by side, we hear that Mos Def vocally does not stay true to Chuck Berry's Maybellene. Jeffery Wright, pompadourable as Muddy Waters, lacks that man's barrel-deep baritone but has suitable swagger on I'm a Man.

And Beyoncé? For all her gifts, she can't better James. The likable B just doesn't sound as believable as the long-sufferer who finds herself, finally, in love, her heart "wrapped in clover."

As for Academy Award-winner Adrien Brody, who plays Leonard Chess, he does not appear on the soundtrack at all. Label owner Chess had a nose for talent, but was no musician himself. Brad Wheeler