OxfordPress.com

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Verdict: Doesn't really rock along as you'd hope.

Details: Starring John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Susan Sarandon and Ruben Blades. Directed by Tim Robbins. Rated R for profanity and sexuality. 2 hours, 12 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Bless his bleeding liberal heart. Tim Robbins has put his money — and more importantly, his art — where his mouth is. "Cradle Will Rock," an overcluttered, overearnest movie, has one thing going for it: integrity. Robbins and his star-laden cast could all be making big bucks doing something, well, a little more overtly commercial.

Alas, their commitment and good intentions don't make this a better movie. "Cradle" takes its title from Marc Blitzstein's musical "The Cradle Will Rock," which was famously staged in 1937 in an impromptu, to-hell-with-the government-censors performance led by director Orson Welles and John Houseman.

Robbins uses this event — electrifyingly restaged in the film — as the central thread in a series of interlocking stories illustrating the collision of art and politics in Depression-era New York.

While fat-cat zillionaires like Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) discreetly buy masterpieces from Mussolini's swank, wheeler-dealer former mistress (Susan Sarandon), Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), head of the Federal Theatre Project, which was Blitzstein's backer, bravely stands up to a wrongheaded committee of right-wing politicians who see her theatrical company as a hotbed of communism and want it shut down. Blitzstein's (Hank Azaria) musical, you see, with its pro-labor sentiments, is precisely the sort of thing that makes the committee literally see red.

Others in the large and generally excellent cast are Ruben Blades as artist Diego Rivera, Joan Cusack as an adamantly anti-commie informant, Bill Murray as an over-the-hill ventriloquist who becomes her dupe, Cary Elwes as an effete Houseman and John Turturro and Emily Watson as members of the "Cradle" cast who end up literally shouting their lines from the balcony or the orchestra seats.

The standouts are Sarandon, Jones and Vanessa Redgrave as a wealthy patron with a bohemian streak. The weak link is Angus MacFadyen as Welles, who fails to suggest the boy-wonder director vocally or physically and, worse, never captures his self-centered charisma.

Structured as a kind of historical smorgasbord, "Cradle" is part "Ragtime," part "Nashville." And, while there are some wonderful moments, the picture as a whole is didactic and often as self-righteous as the smug right-wingers it attacks. Only in the scenes where Flanagan tries to talk sense to insensitive men do we get a feeling for the tension of the times. The rest is too diffuse, too crowded, to engage even those in the movie audience in sync with Robbins' politics.

See it for the bits of history and for the performances, for its energy and ambition. But remember going in that this is more of a rant than a movie.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]