FILM REVIEW
`Cradle Will Rock': Panoramic Passions on a Playbill From the 30's
By JANET MASLIN
A central event in Tim Robbins' sprawling, ambitious "Cradle Will Rock" is Diego Rivera's creation of a lobby mural for Rockefeller Center. And as the film watches the painter shape his crowded sociopolitical cosmos, populating his canvas with starkly symbolic figures engaged in moral struggle, Robbins works in much the same way himself. Set in 1936, "Cradle Will Rock" is his own sweeping cinematic mural, with both the overarching vision and two-dimensionality that implies. It's a big, brave, sometimes maddeningly reductive film that rises through sheer talent and enthusiasm over its own limitations.
This is shaping up as a darkly offbeat Christmas movie season. With a spate of long, serious films ready to summon holiday visions of death row ("The Green Mile"), life in a mental institution ("Girl, Interrupted") and family tragedy ("Angela's Ashes"), a deadpan guerrilla comedy about Andy Kaufman ("Man on the Moon") and more, Robbins' film actually seems relatively festive by comparison. Its own focus is on a single grand, theatrical gesture that can be seen as crystallizing art, government and economics in the midst of the Depression: the staging by Orson Welles and John Houseman of "The Cradle Will Rock." (Whether to avoid or create confusion, the "the" has been dropped from the title of the film.)
This Brechtian agitprop work by Marc Blitzstein ("Have you heard my latest musical?" Kurt Weill was known to quip about it) becomes, for Robbins, a defining event that yields a "Ragtime"-like tableau. And when linked as it is here to the famously ill-fated Rivera mural, its span grows even greater. From Olive Stanton (Emily Watson), the homeless waif desperate to work in the theater, to Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack), used here to define the relationship between rich patron and rogue artist, "Cradle Will Rock" covers a vast amount of terrain....
With astonishing temerity for a Hollywood feature,..."Cradle Will Rock" also devotes much attention to the Federal Theater Project. It shows how this WPA program to sustain government-financed theater became hugely controversial, in ways that would not only polarize the theater world but also directly affect the "Cradle Will Rock" production. However dry that subject matter sounds, the film's stellar cast and anecdotal approach bring it to life. So Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) is seen dreaming up his musical under the aegis of an imaginary Brecht. And Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), head of the Federal Theater, is an energetic advocate for its many far-flung projects. Meanwhile, at her government office, the well-named Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) is a bureaucrat ever watchful for telltale leftist behavior, like "mixed-race dating," while she attracts the bashful interest of a ventriloquist (Bill Murray) who is one of the film's most affecting characters. The would-be actor Aldo Silvano (John Turturro) bristles at relatives who praise Mussolini. And Margherita Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon), a Hearst newspaper columnist and onetime mistress of Mussolini's, makes herself a glamorous liaison between European Fascism and America's wealthy industrialists.
"I must confess that I'm more interested in the oil in paint than the oil in derricks," the film's Nelson Rockefeller remarks. And its curiously short, deep-voiced William Randolph Hearst confides to a fellow magnate (Philip Baker Hall): "Killing strikers doesn't play to the public. You've got to find a way to give them a dollar -- and take two!" Characters like these might as well be toting placards and speaking in cartoon balloons, and yet "Cradle Will Rock" seems to revel in the very deliberateness of its oversimplifications. Its Orson Welles (played here by Angus Macfadyen, an actor who was no less suited to playing Peter Lawford) raves about art and theater so obnoxiously that it's a wonder nobody throws a bucket of water at him.
With performances that range from similar absurdity to cunning impersonation (Vanessa Redgrave as a dizzy socialite, Ruben Blades' Rivera), the film proves such a dizzying mix of attitudes that it succeeds in remaining a moving target.
And although Robbins might have drawn some of these characters with less obviousness and more satirical bite, he ably keeps this lively, complicated film on track. As the moment approaches for "The Cradle Will Rock" to see the light of day, the material coalesces into something tough and purposeful, yielding a stirring finale. Ultimately, the tenacious and intrepid Robbins makes it clear that he does not intend this as a period piece at all.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
'CRADLE WILL ROCK'
Written and directed by Tim Robbins; director of photography, Jean Yves Escoffier; edited by Geraldine Peroni; music by David Robbins, with songs by Marc Blitzstein; production designer, Richard Hoover; produced by Jon Kilik, Lydia Dean Pilcher and Tim Robbins; released by Touchstone Pictures.
Running time: 132 minutes.
Cast: Hank Azaria (Marc Blitzstein), Ruben Blades (Diego Rivera), Joan Cusack (Hazel Huffman), John Cusack (Nelson Rockefeller), Cary Elwes (John Houseman), Philip Baker Hall (Gray Mathers), Cherry Jones (Hallie Flanagan), Angus Macfadyen (Orson Welles), Bill Murray (Tommy Crickshaw), Vanessa Redgrave (Countess La Grange), Susan Sarandon (Margherita Sarfatti), Jamey Sheridan (John Adair), John Turturro (Aldo Silvano), Emily Watson (Olive Stanton), Stephen Spinella (Donald O'Hara), John Carpenter (William Randolph Hearst) and Gretchen Mol (Marion Davies).