Cadillac Records

I don't know who directed Cadillac Records. It doesn't matter. The movie is execrable. The story of Chess Records, the picture falsifies everything it touches and traffics in the broadest, most offensive ethnic stereotypes. Never matter that the stereotypes may be true: a grasping, cynical Jewish businessman who exploits his black artists and torches his nightclub to raise money for his recording studio is, nonetheless, something more than the mere, nasty description in the film...similarly, primitive field-hand Negroes from the delta capable of making the blues are, also, far more than their sum of their oppression and ignorance. But the picture doesn't recognize this as it stutters along, documenting incoherently ten or so years of the Chess story. Some of the musical performances in the film are worth looking at -- but they are ruined by tendentious cutting that suggests that the music made by the black artists is a pure expression of emotion, song like birdsong, an instinctual representation of feelings. The worst example of this is Beyonce Knowles' impressive performance of the Etta James tune "I'd rather be blind". The movie posits the song as true and beautiful because exactly reflecting Etta's feelings of rage, grief, and jealousy at the collapse of her (highly improbable) relationship with Leonard Chess -- but, in fact, a person immersed in feelings of rage and grief and jealousy never created any art whatsoever; the art lies in the calm recollection of the emotions and their transmutation into beautiful, significant form. Messy emotions don't make art -- even if you're an illiterate Delta field hand. The ungainly narrative style of the picture, it's confusing mise en scene, the unwitting racism, the introduction of characters who inexplicably vanish (for instance, a blonde bombshell in a Cadillac that suggests that Chess bribe his black artist's with cars since these scions of sharecroppers are apparently too dumb to understand currency), the sheer ugly falsification of most of the picture make it an unpleasant experience, although the muddle suggests a much longer, more interesting film, slashed to ribbons on the cutting room floor. It hurts me to think what Spike Lee could have done with this material, or, even better, how Rossellini's cautious telephoto lens and didactic dialogue could have dissected the narrative into meaningful, historical discourse. This is gutless film that shows how confused our national discourse on race has become -- most mainstream critics have hailed this movie, apparently because of its content, as powerful, effective, and useful. But it's none of those things -- it's a racist film that stars some goodlooking colored folks who have the good will of critics and nothing more. Here's a scheme for a great movie: eight recording sessions of famous blues songs, starting with Robert Johnson, shot like a documentary, each session occupying 13 minutes of footage, and focusing on exactly what happens in the session -- this would teach us more about art, race, technology, and our history than a thousand specious epics like Cadillac Records.