The mixing of communities here (Leonard being Jewish and noting the attendant disadvantages) recalls director Darnell Martin’s first feature, I Like It Like That (1994), but the new movie mostly glosses over economic and political details. Understanding that race records make money for white people, Leonard gives Muddy a new Cadillac and takes him along on the road to radio stations, where he pays off DJs to get his artists heard. And so he enters into the relationship that will define his career and the film’s repetitive “family” structure, a contract with Chess Records, founded in 1950 by Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody). When she suggests that Muddy is not marriageable material but also that his music “took me someplace so good,” he redoubles that effort to find a world big enough for his voice, beyond the shack, beyond the sidewalk, beyond Geneva’s generous heart. Geneva, vibrant and practical-minded, serves here and elsewhere as motivation. The structure is simple and too familiar, appendage-women illustrating focal-point men’s professional success and emotional vulnerabilities, and the rationale that this is the “way it was” in decades past is not reason enough to perpetuate the fictions (that is, the women have stories too, even if no one has told them). None is especially visible, but as a concept, they provide a limited and mostly clichéd sense of Muddy’s experience as a musician and early crossover star for Chess Records. Their meeting, like the one with Lomax, initiates another trajectory for Muddy: she stays home looking woeful in her apron while he’s on the road and sleeping with multiple women. Here his life is shaped as still more iconic moments: he recruits harmonica player Little Walter (Columbus Short) by challenging him to play with him on a street corner, he sings on a sidewalk to attract the attention of his wife to be, Geneva (Gabrielle Union), who leans out her apartment window to flirt (“You trouble, you know that?”) and invite him inside. That meeting, over-explains narrator Dixon, leads Muddy to think his voice is “too big for that shack,” as Muddy walks off down literal roads and railroad tracks, winding his way to the big city (and not mentioning that he’d already been to St. When he plays it back, Muddy looks perplexed: “Feel like I’m meetin’ myself for the first time,” he mumbles. The 1941 moment looks iconic: Muddy plays his guitar and wails a bit, while chickens pick through dirt near his shack and Lomax leans into his recording machine, stowed in his car trunk, and smiles enthusiastically. Muddy’s trek to Chicago from Mississippi is initiated here by an encounter with Alan Lomax (Tony Bentley). The universe for this mattering is broadly sketched. This means, per those same conventions, that no matter how crowded the movie becomes with potential protagonists and storylines - and it does become very crowded - he provides an engaging interesting throughline, a figure whose fate seems to matter, if only by sheer force of will. It helps Cadillac Records that the primary figure in this early family configuration is Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), blessed as he is with charisma and an abiding self-confidence. That means, per movie conventions, they will fight and make up, nurture and betray, and succeed and fail as a unit that is never entirely convinced of their unity. “They was a family now,” observes Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer) of the artists who form the bluesy, Chicago-based Headhunters in 1947.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |