Winning at Chess

In the late Forties, Fifties and early Sixties Leonard Chess used his Chicago company, Chess Records, to catapult a group of black musical stars from the ghetto of "race music" to national and international importance. This movie is that story. In a way it's nothing more than a group version of a conventional musical "biopic." But when you remember how bland and inauthentic Dreamgirls was and see how intense and real these people are on screen, you appreciate the difference. Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Mos Def, Beyoncé Knowles, and other excellent actors deliver their individual scenes with a vigor and intensity that surprises. This isn't as powerful as the historically free but moving Billie Holiday film bio starring Diana Ross, Lady Sings the Blues. This is loose about history too--it leaves out all but the main musicians, and ignores the role played in the business by Chess's brother. But Cadillac Records is good at making cultural history personal.

This is about how "race records" became soul music and soul became rock 'n' roll and black artists like Chuck Berry and Etta James made hits that topped the charts not just in the Negro market but throughout the nation and abroad. And the Rolling Stones rode in on it and the Bee Gees and the Beach Boys stole from it. Some of them got successfully sued by Willie Dixon, who wrote a majority of the Chess Records hits and whose on screen avatar, Cedric the Entertainer, narrates this film.

The story begins in 1941,when Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) was a sharecropper in the South. Alan Lomax came to record him for Folkways Records. When he experienced that and heard himself sing he realized he was somebody and he went to Chicago and played on the street. His countrified bottleneck style didn't fly up there, but as the movie tells it Muddy adapted at whiz-bang speed and, well, though it doesn't say so, I guess Chicago blues was born. Chess threw Muddy out of his club (he had one) but sought him out later to record for him. Word had gone around: this man was a mean blues singer.

The movie works in vignettes, historical sound-bites, but the great Jeffrey Wright, who's idiosyncratic and subtle as Muddy, sets a standard that one actor after another lives up to, each in his or her own way. Even the White Man, the Jewish Mr. Chess, though Brody is little more than a slick clothes horse at times, still has a dash that helps sell the movie. Columbus Short is astonishing as the brilliant but hellbent-on-destruction "harp" (harmonica) accompanist Little Walter. He tears up the screen, gives so much you're afraid he may explode. And Beyoncé, who dissapointed in Dreamgirls, seeming a pretty face and a big voice doomed to blandness, makes up for it in spades here, daring to rend the air with her blue words. Her Etta may fall short of the real thing but she comes close.

Along comes Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker)--who dares to take no direction from the generally aloof, imperious Chess, whose gifts of new Cadillac cars to his stable of hitmakers mixed kindness with condescension. And in a whole new vein, funny and bold and full of possibilities for the new directions crossover was taking the label, comes Chuck Berry. Mos Def too astonishes as Berry. He's hilarious, adorable, and also surprisingly accurate in looks and mannerisms. He's a paradox, a spot-on facsimile who's also droll amd original--just one of many examples how these black actors have talent to burn. Their impersonations, each in a slightly different key, are a lot of fun to watch.

Nearly all are train wrecks in one way or another--or car wrecks, since the most self-destructive of them, Little Walter, tears off the four doors from his Caddy and then crashes it into the studio, not long thereafter dying young of a bullet wound before drugs and alcohol can kill him. Everybody has a user problem, except the angry, defiant Howlin' Wolf. This is a group version of the romantic myth of the tragic doomed and suffering artist. Would a happy artist, if you could find one, just not make a watchable movie? Is this the indispensable musical myth?

Myth or no, what's valid and well presented in Cadillac Records is the struggle of black artists and the ambiguous role of their Jewish promoter. Though Chess is represented as in love with Etta James and close as kin to Muddy Waters (as Muddy is to Little Walter), he's bossy and paternalistic and cold with the others and they often say he just cares about them because they make him money. Meanwhile the movie shows how up into the Sixties the artists suffer Jim Crow restrictions and humiliations. Chuck Berry sleeps in his car rather than stay at a Negroes-only hotel. He's also carted off unceremoniously to jail for Mann Act violations at the height of his fame.

"It took a man duck-walking across a stage," growls narrator Willie Dixon, 'to integrate an audience." And here right on cue comes another historical sound-bite: Chuck Berry duck-walking while white kids and black kids push past cops and guards to dance on both sides of the segregated auditorium. (Going by my own experience, jazz was integrated more smoothly and earlier. Was that because it didn't ever reach American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show, and so, to white America, didn't really matter?)

The supreme meltdowns that climax the hasty story line are Little Walter's, Etta James's, and that of Chess himself. Walter dies. Etta nearly goes under from heroin. Chess leaves the record company while Etta sings him a last passionate soul kiss of a farewell song--a powerful segue even though it's hardly even clear why he has to go--and he rushes off and dies of a heart attack in his own Caddy before he's driven around the corner.

One of the best conceived scenes shows Muddy dressing the dead Little Walter for his burial while a black-and-white TV angled in the background shows Elvis jiving on stage, warbling one of his hits stolen from the black blues repertory. The scene telegraphs information, yet is subtle and dreamy and memorable. Wright's performance is all pouting ironies. He does some comic mugging (the movie only occasionally takes itself too seriously) but generally underacts. His musical performances speak volumes of his underappreciated versatility as a character actor second to none in contemporary American movies.

If only the director didn't let so much dialogue get thrown away, and hadn't relied so much on extreme closeups for the emotional moments. This isn't a great movie. But it's a great story that, unlike the plastic Dreamgirls, delivers a music that's rich, potent, and flavorful--black music tasted by white people before the super-packaging of Motown. And yet this is packaging too. Chess Records delivers the supple Muddy Waters in progressively livelier, more vivid and more commercial stylings as he morphs from Folkways artifact to salty Chicago Blues legand to recording classic. When Etta James needs a remake she gets a string backup and does wonders with it. The final word has to be the cliché that this is a movie you've just got to see for the music. But it's also a movie to see for the black artists in good roles that matter, delivering more on screen than you have any right to expect.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.