Dumbed-Down History

Who Do You Love? Directed by Jerry Zaks Runtime: 90 min.

Just two years after Cadillac Records, the new movie Who Do You Love? retells the same story about the founding of the blues music label Chess Records in the 1950s. This isn’t a case of second-time improvement—like Doug McGrath’s funny, moving Infamous out-classing the dour Capote. In Who Do You Love? everything that Chess Records has come to symbolize about pop culture, race relations or the blues transitioning into rock ‘n’ roll gets flattened. It perceives American history in reverse.

Darnell Martin’s concept in Cadillac Records (one of the most enjoyable American movies of the past decade) brilliantly conflated both Leonard and Phil Chess into one figure to better understand the fact of racial privilege, motives of entrepreneurship and contradictions of immigrant vs. slave advancement. But Who Do You Love? literalizes the fact of two Jewish brothers (played by Alessandro Nivola and Jon Abrahams), sons of Polish émigrés in Chicago. Predictably, the focus is diffuse. The screenwriters fall back on a naive view of white-black relations that keeps the story of musical exploitation hidden behind the romance of the music and the distant past.

This is clearest in the scene where Leonard Chess presents Muddy Water (David Oyelowo) with a gleaming white Cadillac Eldorado convertible with red interior. Chess’ “gift”—a moment of blatant patronization—goes unspecified. Director Jerry Zaks never links it to the practice of sharecropper exploitation as writer-director Martin did in Cadillac Records. This is dumbed-down history, minus the complexities about political economy and social/racial customs that made Cadillac Records, with its perfectly symbolic title, so extraordinary.

Who Do You Love? drags us back to Great Man White Man Theory of history. (Its perfectly scared title derives from Bo Diddley’s hit yet only shyly questions cultural myths that favor status-quo history.) Great Chess Records artists like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, Little Walter and Etta James receive second-class citizen status in the narrative that emphasizes the Chess Brothers’ business daring without critiquing their dubious morality. (You could say that their personal asides keep the coloreds in the dark.) The Chess Brothers argue the financial risks of collateralized loans but there’s no insight into their own, deliberate finagling with artists. The husky Chi McBride portrays songwriter Willie Dixon (a role narrated by Cedric the Entertainer in Cadillac Records) as little Leonard Chess’ mentor-Uncle Tom. He boasts “I’m his guide into the exotic Negro world,” but the role, though glibly self-conscious, diminishes Dixon’s significance. That tense race-and-class symbiosis that gave Cadillac Records friction and juice is also patronized in pseudo-sophistication.

Leonard Chess’ fascination with black culture comes through as simplistic ambivalence, starting with a 1933 childhood flashback where he writes an I.O.U. to an old black street musician and puzzles over the man’s colloquial term “motherfucker.” Throughout the film, Chess uses that word in changeable iterations, never sure of its original meaning—ignoring the fact that it basically refers to ruthless manipulators like himself. Nivola, who convincingly portrayed a Brit-pop lothario in Laurel Canyon, can’t grasp Chess’ nerve; he’s mostly petulant—even when holding a gun to the head of a patron who disrupts his newly opened nightclub. Alongside the various black musicians, Nivola’s Chess seems a reticent white Jewish onlooker, occasionally imitating a Michael Corleone-style low-simmer. His brother’s question, “Who are you with the gun, Meyer Lansky?” is the closet the film gets to a tough view of music biz impudence.

Only the musical performances in Who Do You Love? are satisfactory. The making of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” gets past its hokey men’s room set-up because it mythifies a wonderfully profane piece of Americana whose vernacular at first stupefies the Polish-speaking Chess; it’s simply fun to see. Oyelowo lacks the world-weary sexiness of Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy, but his baby-face insolence is uncanny—plus he parades the older, successful Muddy’s conk just right. All the singing is enjoyable, even Megalyn Echikunwoke’s lounge-act rendition of Etta James’ “At Last.” Not the complicated racial, sexual, self-destructive enigma Beyoncé made vivid, Echikunwoke is meant to literalize Chess’ attraction to the Other but the idea goes nowhere because the character lacks autonomy. She’s named Ivy to avoid a suit from James—a sign of the film’s ultimate failure. It fumbles the deep intricacy of American race relations whether sexual, collegial or profession. The moment Dixon confronts the Chess exploitation (“You know this is the first time I ever looked at you and saw a white man”) is hollow. A good screenwriter would have known this was the moment to resurrect “motherfucker.”

But by opening with Robert Randolph’s impersonation of Bo Diddley introducing his hit at a Brooklyn Paramount performance, director Zaks displays some genuine appreciation of spectacular performance. In his black suit and white socks, Randolph’s Diddley capers about the stage with lightness and energy. As Randolph himself recreates the great Bo Diddley beat, that chugging, agitating riff sounds fresh—it’s a moment of both creation and revolution. In some future cinema utopia these Robert Randolph/ Bo Diddley scenes will be spliced into Cadillac Records and all will seem right with the world.