A rose and a brickbat

Caught up with two movies I wanted to see over the holidays which came out on DVD recently. The winner is Cadillac Records, based on the true story of Chess Records, its founder Leonard Chess, and its star performers (including blues singer Muddy Waters, harmonica player Little Walter, and rock legend Chuck Berry). The script could use some tightening, but this is one of those movies worth seeing for its excellent performances. I don't usually like Adrian Brody (I think he looks like a ferrety kind of animal that should stay underground), but he's fine here as Chess, a white Jewish club owner in Chicago who starts up a record label specializing in what was known then as "race music"; in other words, music by black performers. Chess is the focus of the film, and though he was criticized for cheating many of his artists out of money (the title of the film comes from the fact that he gave some of his stars new Cadillacs rather than cash), he is portrayed positively here. In the first half of the film, set in the early 50's, almost equal weight is given to Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) who, according to the simplified backstory in the script, leaves his life as a sharecropper in Mississippi to forge a career as a singer in Chicago, first on the streets, then under Chess's wing.

But as Waters' star gets tarnished through the years, he drops out of the story, replaced by feisty Little Walter (Columbus Short), who becomes the movie's tragic figure, scowling singer Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), and Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles), who gets tangled up in drugs and what seems to be an affair with Chess--he "keeps" her in a nice house and clearly is madly in love with her, but how much she responds to him is unclear. Given the importance of Chuck Berry (Mos Def) to the beginnings of rock & roll, he is given surprisingly short shrift here. Still, this is a movie to be relished for the performances. All the actors do their own singing and for the most part are successful, though you'd never mistake their versions of songs like "Mannish Boy" or "No Particular Place to Go" for the originals. Brody is good and Knowles is very good, much better than she had a chance to be in Dreamgirls, but the real class act here is Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters (pictured above with Brody)--he doesn't look like Waters, but he disappears so deeply into the role that I didn't recognize him and had to go to IMDb halfway through the film to figure out who was playing the role. He should have been a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination, and he makes you sorry that he vanishes from the film for long stretches. See this movie.

The loser was Baz Luhrmann's Australia. I loved his earlier Moulin Rouge; it was a badly flawed movie in some ways, but the sheer energy and inventiveness on display and the wild melange of music carried me through, to say nothing of the sweet Ewan McGregor. This would-be epic of two lovers, an adopted aboriginal boy, and their travails in 40's Australia falls flat in every department. There are moments of visual beauty, and the first half-hour, with Nicole Kidman as the snooty English lady out of her element in rough-and-tumble Australia forging a relationship with hunky cowboy Hugh Jackman, though predictable, shows promise, but at over 2-1/2 hours, the film becomes a bloated sack of pretension. Kidman and Jackman never quite gel as a combustible couple, despite a very sexy first kiss scene. David Wenham as the bad guy sets off some sparks, but he can't save the movie. Don't bother.