Last Gasps
Tim Robbins has never been shy about being one of them
damn Hollywood liberals -- pro-union, anti-death
penalty, solidly Green, married to Susan Sarandon. To
his credit, however, while his first two outings as a
screenwriter and director reflected his political
views, Robbins took great pains to present his issues
as evenhandedly as possible. Bob Roberts skewered
ultraconservative politicians with cryptic motives
underlying their strident flag-waving, but made a
point of demonstrating how the equally shrill (and
just as reactionary) left opens the door wide to such
creatures. Robbins' second feature, the superb Dead
Man Walking, was informed by his views on capital
punishment (and those of Sister Helen Prejean, on
whose book the film was based) but never whitewashed
or excused the character and crimes of executed killer
Matthew Poncelet, resulting in a film that was less a
polemic than a catalyst to open debate on the death
penalty.
Robbins' third feature film, on the other hand, starts
on the left and entrenches there, but the result is
terrific. Although Cradle Will Rock had only a
limited theatrical release and did dismal business,
the cast is impressive, the humor is dead-on, and the
direction is flat-out beautiful. If Frank Capra,
Preston Sturges, and Woody Allen collaborated on a
Depression-era feel-good flick, it would look
something like this.
Set in the late Thirties and based on real events,
Cradle Will Rock is a mosaic film centered around a
little-known arm of FDR's Works Projects
Administration, the Federal Theater Project. Just as
other of the so-called "alphabet agencies" under the
WPA's aegis sought to jump-start employment in order
to stimulate the economy, the Federal Theater Project
was designed to create work for people employed in
live theatre, subsidizing small companies on regional
tours of schools and small towns and bankrolling
off-Broadway productions. In this way it was very much
like the current National Endowment for the Arts, and
just as embattled. In this period following the
Russian Revolution, the nation suffered the beginnings
of the Red Scare, with labor unions viewed by many as
hotbeds of Bolshevism and, as it would be in the
Fifties, the arts community was seen as a hive of
Communist sympathizers. Into this imbroglio comes a
young, struggling songwriter named Marc Blitzstein
(Hank Azaria), who gets caught up in a riot between
rallying protesters and mounted police strikebreakers.
After being billy-clubbed and tossed into jail as an
agitator Blitzstein begins to envision Cradle Will Rock, a full-length musical about the rise of a
steelworkers' union against capitalist oppression.
Four years later, his production falls into the hands
of maverick director Orson Welles and producer John
Houseman (played with outrageous gusto by Angus
MacFayden and Cary Elwes, respectively).
The main story, the staging of this blatantly
quasi-socialist musical, is interspersed with
secondary stories revolving around it. Young
gazillionaire Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack), who
fancies himself an art connoisseur because he's met
Picasso and Matisse, buys a da Vinci from Margherita
Sarfatti (Susan Sarandon), an aristocratic Italian art
dealer who is making the rounds of New York's
industrialists selling off her country's treasures to
raise cash for Mussolini (Sarandon's accent is
marginal at best, but her performance nicely conveys
Sarfatti's moral dilemma as she is torn between her
patriotic duty and her regret at handing the
masterworks over to philistines like Rockefeller and
steel tycoon Gray Mathers). Then, needing a mural for
the lobby of his new eponymous Center, Rockefeller
calls on Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades), unaware that
Rivera, with Frida Kahlo looking on reverently, will
create a dynamic tableau of a workers' rebellion
against the cancer of capitalism -- represent
literally as cancer -- to greet visitors to
Rockefeller's monument to his own success.
Meanwhile, the newly formed House Un-American
Activities Committee has begun hearings to root out
Communists in the Federal Theatre Project, calling on
an FTP clerk (Joan Cusack) and a broken-down
vaudeville ventriloquist (a terrific Bill Murray),
among others, to supply testimony before going after
the Project's director (Cherry Jones) in grand
proto-McCarthyist style. The Project is immediately
shut down, as it happens, on the very day Cradle Will Rock is scheduled to open. What follows is a mosaic
sequence in which Welles' company (including John
Turturro and Emily Watson) attempt like troupers to
stage the musical anyway, just once, while Rockefeller
employees take sledgehammers to Rivera's mural, the
ventriloquist, wracked with guilt, gives a
career-ending performance, and Rockefeller, Mathers,
William Randolph Hearst, and their cronies drink
champagne at a masked ball and toast each other as
kings of the earth, unaware that their world is about
to be sledgehammered as well by the very forces
they've been so avidly bankrolling.
The divisions in this film could not be clearer if
Robbins had erected walls and razorwire between the
haves and have-nots, but that's not really the point
here. What Robbins shows us, and what we should focus
on, is the overwhelming sense of loss at this
pivotal time in American history. Only a stone's throw
away from our entry into the Second World War, America
is about to lose its innocence to a post-War world
dominated by global superpowers, hypnotized by
television, and quaking in the shadow of the Bomb. The
giants in this film -- Welles, Rivera, Rockefeller,
Mathers, even the unseen Roosevelt -- will soon be
dead or diminished. The War changed the stature of art
and theatre from monolithic institutions to mere
diversions, and that of Gilded-Age capitalism itself,
from the heroic and fairly mythic proportions embodied
in its flamboyant tycoons to the blank facade of the
corporation -- Citizen Kane gives way to the Man in
the Grey Flannel Suit. Although our own latter-day
tycoons (Trump, Forbes, Gates) and artists (Warhol,
Oldenburg) have tried to live as large as their
spiritual forebears did, they just seem out of place
somehow. We have become too cynical to romanticize
them. Blitzstein's lost musical and Rivera's lost
mural were products of real courage, Robbins tells us,
two last gasps of romance in what would become a
decidedly unromantic age. Heavy-handed though Robbins'
film may be, it fulfills the first, best function of
art, to show us something we've been missing.
