Cadillac Records

Two years my friend Agnes and I went to see Dreamgirls at the spectacular Metrolux multiplex at the Centerra lifestyle center outside Loveland. It was around New Year's time, and when we walked out, we both blurted out that we hated it, and for nearly the same reason: the movie was supposedly a fictionalized representation of Motown in the 1960s, but from our point-of-view, it had gotten everything about that era so horribly, horribly wrong.

At that time I was hardly seeing any movies, and it clued me into a trend that had been long in the making, which I can only describe as "denial of history" by contemporary cinema. This is the fallacy that "people have always talked, acted, and related to each other as they do now." If this posture is adopted by explicit design, that is forgivable and possibly interesting, but when it arises out ignorance and laziness, as I suspect it often does, it makes it hard for me to enjoy the movie.

Dreamgirls seemed particularly heinous because it tried to compress too much (phony) history into one set of characters, in the over-stylized way of Forest Gump. Agnes and I both wandered: "Why not make a historical picture about the real history of Motown, instead of all this phony crap?"

Well, one has come along, attempting to tell at least a little bit of the story of that time. Right away that means the movie gets a "plus one" in my book.

I would not have known about Cadillac Records if it weren't for the single trailer I saw before Soul Men last month in Cambridge. It crawled into limited release two weeks ago, and I was sure I was going to have to drive sixty miles or more to see it. But by some miracle, it showed up in Leominster last week week, out in the far-flung suburbs, as if made to order just for me, especially with all the roads clogged with snow.

Actually I didn't go to Leominster, but its nearby sister city of Fitchburg, where the movie was also showing. It took me nearly a half hour of crawling at an ant's pace through the apocalyptically clogged back streets to find the place where it was showing. But it was the kind of place I loved most: a strip-mall multiplex, wedged in between other businesses. I just have a fondness for these faded places. As in Leominster, the matinees are dirt cheap.

The movie is a quiet little affair, telling the simplified story of Chess Records, an early R&B label, founded and run on the South Side of Chicago by Polish-American Len Chess (played by Andrian Brody), and telling the story of the various musicians who rose to fame via Chess, focusing in particular on Muddy Waters, played brilliantly by Jeffrey Wright. As the story progresses, we meet Little Walter (Columbus Short), Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles). I mention the actors' names here because all of them seemed convincing to me in their roles, giving very earnest performances that were not over-the-top postmodern reinterpretions of how the characters should have been, if they had lived today.

That in fact was the danger I suspected with this movie. Would they attempt to tell the story of 1950's musicians in the idiom of present-day hip-hop? Would this come across with a glib Made-for-MTV sort of lightness? Some of that touch was inevitable, given its limited budget and the fact that it was written and directed by Darnell Martin, whose previous work is almost all in television. But whenever it started creaking into that kind of territory, the story shifted into a new phase and I found myself interested anew in the characters.

This is essentially a classic "rags-to-stardom" story, about both the record label and the individual artists. Inevitably the real biographies and history must be mutated into the poetics of Hollywood cinema. Thus in watching Act One ("rise to success"), I sat in the audience waiting for the shoe to drop. At the start of Act Two, what challenges would arise that would threaten the initial success? Would they be in the form of cheap cop-outs (sabotage, bad luck, misapprehension, etc.)? Would they be under the vague label of "can't handle success"? Would I be able to see them coming miles away while I fidgeted in my seat waiting for the story to get around to showing the obvious? Or would the story introduce them in a way that was fresh and interesting, while still creating sufficient narrative tension? To a large extent, I judge this type of movie by how it handles these questions.

To my pleasant surprise, the movie avoided worn-out clichés by telling a succession of overlapping stories of each of the individual musicians as they show up. The Len Chess story becomes a Muddy Waters story becomes a Little Walter story becomes an Etta James story, and so on. It all happens under the umbrella of the story of the label itself, which has its own gentle trajectory. The introduction of new artist made the story seem fresh again, which is the way music feels. Just when I felt things bogging down at the mid-point, in walks Chuck Berry, who brings a whole new dimension to everything that has happened up to that point. I thought to myself as I watched Mos Def in character, doing a duck walk across the stage: this is how rock and roll must have felt like. Not bad for a quiet little movie that snuck into theaters.