Amazon.com video review:
"Based on a (mostly) true story," according to the opening titles,
Tim Robbins's dazzling dramatization of one of the great stories in American
theater indeed takes a few liberties with history. Ostensibly the story of
the mayhem surrounding Marc Blitzstein's worker's opera The Cradle Will
Rock, directed by Orson Welles for the WPA at the height of the
Depression,
Robbins paints a veritable mural around this incident, a city alive with
plotting
industrialists (John Cusack as Nelson Rockefeller), radical artists (Ruben
Blades's Diego Rivera), and struggling citizens (Bill Murray's frustrated
vaudeville ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw). Lightning strikes when the
government closes the show before it even opens and the cast marches
20 blocks to an empty theater and tosses the staging aside to perform in
the
aisles, the balconies, and the seats. It's a rare moment of cinema
capturing
the immediacy and charge of live theater on the screen and it's the heart
of
Robbins's often exhilarating film. His heroes are Blitzstein (a warm, gently
impassioned Hank Azaria) and cheery WPA Theater director Hallie Flanagan
(Broadway star Cherry Jones), but in the process he snidely turns Welles
and
producer John Houseman into sour, silly caricatures. The stew of artistic
creation and political action gets murky and at times contradictory, but
vivid performances and Robbins' driving pace and staccato crosscutting keep
it humming through even the most didactic moments. The songs are by Blitzstein, and the
character-rich cast
also features Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, Emily
Watson,
and Philip Baker Hall. --Sean Axmaker
