Cadillac Records.

"Darnell Martin's Cadillac Records tells the story of Chicago's Chess Records and the seminal blues artists it launched, among them Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Etta James," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The film moves swiftly and leaves out details, but that barely matters. The ensemble is stupendous - howlingly great - and the music goes deep."

"Rock obscurantists can be worse sticklers than sci-fi fanboys, but it must be said that Cadillac Records doesn't condescend to history even when jumbling facts," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE: "scenes are largely treated as interactions between feasible humans, not as excuses to broadcast racial parable. Respect is paid to the complex cultural pluralities behind the music.... It was the 20th century's truest music, and Cadillac Records doesn't disgrace it."

Updated through 12/5.

The film "resembles not the raw and immediate blues, R&B and rock n' roll singles that made Chess a pioneer, but the bloated, unfocused full-length albums that would later become the industry's stock and trade," argues Nick Schager at Slant.

"[S]o egregious are the deficiencies and distortions here - in this universe, the Rolling Stones came to the US, and the Beach Boys ripped off Chuck Berry long before anyone had ever heard of Elvis Presley - that it's almost impossible to discern whether there's anything decent about the moviemaking itself," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

Earlier: A backgrounder on Cadillac and Chess from Frank DiGiacomo in Vanity Fair.

Update: "What if Cadillac Records had been a miniseries instead of a movie?" wonders Jonathan Kiefer. "Then it might feel like a proper epic. Then those main players might get the solo time they all deserve - something more than the standard movie-bio highlight moments of inspiration, opportunity, fortune, misfortune, drugs, sex, vanity, violence, and tragic too-early death - and the absentees might even take the stage as well. But as a film it feels hurried and confined."

Updates, 12/4: "While it tells the story of an exciting period in American pop culture, Cadillac Records winds up being so trite, tidy and two-dimensional that you would swear you were watching a late-night infomercial for the great music of Chess Records," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "All that's missing is a toll-free number and a paid walk-on by Frankie Avalon."

Michael Ordoña talks with Jeffrey Wright for the Los Angeles Times.

"It's Obama time and black artists still suffer segregation," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "How else to explain the Gotham Independent Film Awards ignoring Cadillac Records, the most excitingly performed American movie this year?"

Updates, 12/5: Jeffrey Wright, "as protean and serious an actor as any working in American movies, seems to be writing his own version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr's collection of essays on various styles of African-American manhood," AO Scott in the New York Times. "In each case, whether playing a former soldier or a tormented artist, Mr Wright directs our attention away from the familiar, public face of the character in question toward a private zone where ambition struggles with anxiety, and where what seems to be at stake is nothing less than the integrity and viability of the self. And so, in his Muddy Waters, we see pride, ambition and uncertainty cohabiting with musical genius, sexual appetite and stubborn professionalism."

"Sometimes the fictions that spring up around pop music are the most direct source of its truth," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "It's highly unlikely that Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil at the crossroads, but no one cares that the story isn't 100 percent true, or even just 1 percent true. Even though pop music needs its obsessive discographers and fact gatherers - you've got to have someone around to keep the story straight for future generations - music finds its true home in our imagination anyway. The tall tales and legends that go along with the artists we love become part of the texture of the music; they're the hiss and pop between the grooves. That's the spirit in which Darnell Martin's Cadillac Records, the extremely fictionalized story of the founding and flowering of Chicago's legendary Chess Records, needs to be approached."

"Ah, the race-conscious musical biopic," sighs Stephen Garrett in Time Out New York. "Cadillac Records, an earnest, raucous but minor film about the trajectory of independent R&B label Chess and its profound impact on rock & roll, will round out a nice DVD box set with Ray and Talk to Me about how music brought down segregation barriers and gave opportunity, self-respect and wealth to black people - all at a cost, sure, but in a way that turns that hardship into songs of redemption."

"Almost unavoidably, the film includes a lot of fine music," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "But as with most music biopics, it's never clear where it comes from, or how there's time to make it between the boozing and the bedding."

"Given the number of characters and the time covered, Martin does an effective job of sketching the backgrounds of some of her subjects and doesn't go out of her way to indict Leonard's business methods," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Cadillac Records could use more music and less mugging," writes Tasha Robinson in the Los Angeles Times. "But after every misstep, the film seems to find its feet again."

For Tribeca, Elisabeth Donnelly talks with Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright.

"What if we regarded biopics in the same way we do jazz standards: a familiar, generic framework that each artist makes his or her own through improvisation?" asks Dana Stevens in Slate. "After all, no one asks why Ella Fitzgerald is singing that corny old 'How High the Moon' again. We listen to what she does with the song."

"Scene after scene, Cadillac Records is thin, flat and rote," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2008 6:24 AM