Cradle Will Rock

I'm not going to be coy. I love this film, and because I want everyone else in America to see it, I'll tell you why.

Cradle is based on a true story, although the opening credits admit that there has been artistic license taken. It's set in the late 1930s, when the Great Depression was still in progress and Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration had turned the federal government into one of America's biggest employers. As part of the WPA Roosevelt established the Federal Theater Program, a federally funded project designed to a) give theater professionals work, b) bring low-cost theater to rural and poor communities and c) support and encourage American playwrights and composers. The plot is, primarily, the story of one FTP production, a Brechtian pro-union musical called "Cradle Will Rock" by gay composer/librettist Marc Blitzstein (played by Hank Azaria). The main story line follows Blitzstein and a number of the actors involved in the project, along with producer John Houseman (played by a completely unrecognizable Cary Elwes) and director/raving lunatic Orson Welles, as the musical is conceived and produced while a battle erupts between Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater Project, and the right-wing Dies Committee on un-American activities, which organizes a series of proto-McCarthyian Congressional "hearings" that ultimately lead to the demise of the program. "Cradle's" pro-labor content suddenly becomes too risky and the government pulls the plug on the production the night before it opens. Locked out of their theater by armed guards and told by the Actors' Equity Union that they are forbidden to perform the play on any other stage, the producers and actors nevertheless find a way to put the show on.

Summarized thus, the film seems like just a variation on a tried and true Hollywood theme-the show businesss comedy where against all odds and in defiance of the limitations of a production's cast, crew, budget and direction, the show does go on and it all works brilliantly. We've seen a number of versions of this in the past ranging from the farcical Noises Off to the more heartfelt Shakespeare in Love. But although that formula is what organizes the plot, Cradle Will Rock is a radically different experience. It's funny and it's heartwarming—but it's also committed, intelligent, self-conscious, and determined not to let us get away with a happy ending. Cradle is about the relationship between art, money, and politics, and unlike most explorations of that menage a trois-which usually come out on the side of "great art has nothing to do with politics"—the underlying message here is that all art is political, even and especially art that is celebrated for "transcending" politics. Cradle is a powerful argument in favor of art that is politically committed and engaged with the material world of labor, poverty and struggle, and an incisive indictment of an elitist establishment whose promotion of an apolitical high-culture canon is linked directly to their own interest in preserving their class's economic and political power.

That political message affects the way the film is made, and that is one of my favorite things about it. Cradle combines what you might call "Hollywood Realism" with expressionist techniques adapted from the socialist drama of the period in an impressively seamless blend that creates a kind of emotional depth that is absent from a lot of the aforementioned socialist drama (forgive me, but I have read a number of really bad plays about the workers' struggle) while at the same time giving the viewer the distance and space necessary to start making a critical examination of the issues raised by the film. This is symbolized by the view we get of Marc Blitzstein's creative process: he's inspired and guided by two imaginary characters, his dead wife Eva and Bertholt Brecht. Eva takes care of the emotional core of the work, while Brecht helps him craft the structure that will give the show its political teeth and artistic bite. The film is the same kind of balance: you get characters you can identify with and a plot you can follow that appears to be taking place in a recognizable "real world," but you also get multiple layers of irony and a production style that pushes that world and these characters to the brink of artificiality. Liza noticed that whenever it snowed, the flakes were abnormally huge and distinct, like confetti stage-snow. Like the snow, the film is real enough to work, but stagy enough to make you start thinking.

And there is a shitload to think about. In addition to the main plot there's a secondary story line involving the young Nelson Rockefeller and his steel-magnate friends, in which Nelson (played by John Cusack) commissions artist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center, then is horrified by the mural’s socialist content. These two plots are ostensibly connected only by Vanessa Redgrave's character, the dotty British wife of steel magnate Mathers. But there's a much more substantial thematic connection: what happens to Diego's mural serves as a dark and brutal corrective to the triumphant performance of "Cradle," suggesting that in America, every victory for the left is accompanied by at least one defeat. In addition, the two plots are connected through one of the film's running themes, which is the interrelation between drama and "real life." The "real" world of Cradle Will Rock mirrors the plot of the musical. While the musical chronicles the progress of a fictional steelworkers' strike, a real one breaks out; the actors live lives that parallel those of their characters; the world of the Rockefellers reflects "Cradle's" overtly allegorical villain "Mr. Mister" and his stable of sycophants and lackeys. Meanwhile the Dies Committee hearings are presented as an alternative form of theater. Weaselly red-baiter Hazel Huffman (played by Joan Cusack) dreams of being called to testify before the committee like a starstruck actress hoping for a major role in a new production; she and her co-conspirator, a ventriloquist played by Bill Murray, role-play their testimony in a theater dressing room; after her testimony Hallie and her fellow Theater Project administrators stage an impromptu parody of the hearings in the deserted committee room. And while "Cradle Will Rock" is being performed in its new venue, Nelson and his pals are attending a costume ball dressed up as 18th-century French aristocrats, which makes their discussion read like dialogue from a film about Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. Meanwhile, to add a few extra layers of complexity, Murray's ventriloquism act is developed as a metaphor for the relationship between the artist and his (public or private) patron, and the Fascist approach to art-explicated in the newsreel footage played in the opening scene of the film, which recounts Hitler's famous exhibition of "Degenerate Art" in Germany-becomes a model for the American establishment's treatment of Diego's mural, Blitzstein's musical, and the Federal Theater Project.

It sounds complicated, and it is: this movie is not short, and it ain't simple. But it's not inaccessible, and it's not at all detached or remote the way your average "art film" tends to be. The film shows the ideological "culture wars" that are still fought over art in this country translating into material and devastating effects on people who are far removed from the grant-writing process, and makes an argument for the importance of art as a political weapon-either in the hands of the state or in the hands of the workers. And perhaps because the film succeeds in selling us on that point, the climactic performance of "Cradle Will Rock" exerts an emotional force that even reviewers who (in my opinion) misunderstand the film as a failed, “heavy-handed” attempt at realism still seem to find difficult to resist. I admit without shame that this part of the movie made me cry. And if the labor-lawyer-lovin' part of me was tearing up, so was the academic, because among other things this film is a beautiful lesson about what makes theater matter. It's because the actors are prevented from using their federally-funded theater with its proscenium stage, tawdry costumes and needlessly complex sets-because the government ban has prevented the actors from using a stage, and therefore forces them to perform the play in the space occupied by the audience-because all of these actors are putting their careers and their material survival on the line by participating in this performance that it works. And it's because we now know enough about the struggle outside the theater to read the struggle going on inside the theater that the play—Brechtian expressionism and all—works for an audience born and raised on nineteenth-century naturalism and its bastard child, the Hollywood drama.

As I said, however, the triumph of the production is balanced with other less good news, and the film closes with a final montage that is a chilling commentary on the ultimate fate of theater in America. And the scariest, most disturbing message the film has to offer is tucked away in the final credits. It's one sentence, and it reads: "Dies Committee dialogue taken directly from the Congressional record." Whatever liberties the filmmakers may have taken with this story, we know that it is a matter of Congressional record that, for instance, a U.S. Congressman seriously asked Hallie whether Christopher Marlowe was a Communist, and that when informed that Marlowe was a well-known Elizabethan playwright who had been dead for almost four hundred years, the same Congressman argued with perfect solemnity that he was probably a Communist anyway.

I haven't even gotten into the many delights offered by the various performances given by an ensemble cast that includes so many good actors-the only real misfire is Paul Giamatti as "Carlo," a buffoonish Italian opera singer whose character appears to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever and certainly does not provide him with much room for interpretation. (Liza begs to differ here, believing that Carlo may have been an intentional attempt to push the movie farther toward the absurd.) Nor have I delved into the hilarious subplot involving a children's musical called "The Revolt of the Beavers." But enough already. Go see this film. Do not believe reviewers who tell you it’s “too didactic” or “too long”—they don’t understand what they’re dealing with. It’s moving, it’s important, and it’s the kind of movie we want to encourage Hollywood to make.

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