Like a scratched LP, Cadillac Records has a few beautiful notes but skips around too much to provide any clear resolution. Beyonce Knowles is breathtaking as Etta James and in some ways I would have preferred seeing a biopic about her alone (or Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry, for that matter). While I understand this is a film about Chess Records and not any one recording artist, I never felt that writer/director Darnell Martin succeeded in making the record label its own character. Failing to establish Chess Records as a solid hub for the spokes of the story resulted in an unstable narrative that could never hit its groove. Characters came and went with little or no explanation and the best the filmmakers could do to tie it all together was to add multiple cards at the end to explain what happened to who and how.
Adrien Brody, as Len Chess, is completely wasted as we never really get to know anything about his character or motivations (besides a few brief glimpses at the very beginning of the movie). One would think that Len Chess, the namesake for the record label, would be an important character worthy of some significant development.
Still, even with its constant jumping around, Cadillac Records has some great music well worth revisiting; might I suggest, however, that you skip the movie and check out the soundtrack instead (or, better yet, the artists’ original recordings).
