Peter Eaton
NOT THE ART MOVIE OFTHEWEEK
‘It’s an epic. It’s a big, big movie,” claims writer and director Tim Robbins of his Cradle Will Rock. Actually, it’s so huge that it hurts and just doesn’t to know what to do with itself for a its 132-minute length. Purporting to be “a (mostly) true story”, Cradle Will Rock compresses so many disconnected events into its plot that it simultaneously bores and thoroughly confuses the viewer.
Set in the art and theatre world of New York City during the Depression, the plot rambles across an eight-month period from November 1936 to the June 1937 performance of the Mark Blitzstein musical described as the first American musical to deal with serious issues. The film claims to address “the psychological split in the United States over New Deal policies; the uneasy relationship between corporate power and the arts; the forces of communism and fascism abroad and their influence on workers in the US; and the connection between a struggling Europe preparing for war and industrial opportunism in America”.
That’s an awful lot to attempt in an eight-month period, so Robbins takes huge liberties with the cultural and historical context and portrays events that were actually years apart. This makes a movie allegedly about important historical issues rather ahistorical.
Cradle Will Rock is good on the contradictions of personal action and political belief, but there are so many overlapping stories that its attempts to mix drama, slapstick, romance and politics become mind-numbing. Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) commissions Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) to paint the lobby of the Rockefeller Centre. Meanwhile Italian propagandist Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon in her worst performance to date) flogs Da Vincis to American millionaires to fund Mussolini. We see Blitzstein composing his radical musical The Cradle Will Rock and being visited by visions of his dead wife and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Then there’s a “paranoid ventriloquist” (Bill Murray) who links up with Hazel Hoffman (Joan Cusack) to thwart the Red Menace. Then Orson Welles (Angus MacFayden, disastrously lacking the big, booming voice) and John Houseman (Cary Elwes) attempt to direct and produce the infamous musical that is eventually closed by the unions. But wait, there’s more. There is Countess La Grange (Vanessa Redgrave looking most uncomfortable), a wacky socialite with a bizarre protg constantly in tow, a starving actress (Emily Watson)and an Italian actor (John Turturro) struggling with his family’s fascist sympathies. The final addition to the mix is the congressional committee investigating communists in the Federal Theater Project.
What are the committed artists and theatre people to do when faced with such meddling? Well, in true inspiring tradition, the show must go on. And when it does it’s a relief because it must mean the end of the film is close. But it’s all done in the style of cheaply triumphal clich, and the historical battle was not won. Robbins tries to hint at this in the movie’s final shot, but most people will simply miss the point.