I am a metal fan at heart. While I've occasionally taken excursions into other genres, I always find myself coming back to my comfort zone. I am actually much more likely to try different styles and genres of film than I am music. I think it has something to do with the sheer volume of different music, and the fact there is a lot that I just have no interest in. Well, my desire to travel back to the 1950s and 1960s blues and R&B sounds has always lurked at the back of my mind, but I have not yet made the time. It is with this in the back of my head that I went to see Cadillac Records. I figured, even if the movie is bad, there should at least be some good music. There was indeed.
Cadillac Records centers on Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), a young man with big dreams, first of opening a club, and then upon a meeting with Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), of becoming a record producer. This film chronicles the rise of Chess Records, a company that was funded by insurance money when a mysterious fire took down Chess' night club. He founded the company on the strength of the talents of Muddy Waters and Little Walter, creating hit record after hit record.
As the years go by, Chess showed a continuing penchant for discovering or being discovered by all manner of talent including Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), and Etta James (Beyonce Knowles). The journey we are taken on is not so much about the business as it is about the rise of the music. What a time it was — the music is phenomenal, especially when you consider that much of it was done by the actors themselves.
Writer/director Darnell Martin does a fine job of giving us a snapshot of the lives of so many people in a rather short period of time. This is both a blessing and a curse. Watching these greats work in the studio (albeit in likely dramatized fashion) is the next best thing to actually being there. The blessing is what we get to see and hear, the music, the bits of their lives as they happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right man.
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