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By Charles Taylor

Dec. 10, 1999 | Is there anyone in the movies whose talent is more screwed up by his politics than Tim Robbins? As an actor, Robbins has brought subtlety and nuance to characters as disparate as the student civil-rights volunteer in "Five Corners," the addled Southern poet in "Miss Firecracker," the horny, hotshot pitcher in "Bull Durham" and the slimy young studio exec in "The Player."

But given a character who stands for something that goes against his politics, like the L.A. cop in "Short Cuts," Robbins resorts to crude caricature, to telling us exactly what we should think of whomever he's playing.

The frustrating thing about Robbins' new film "Cradle Will Rock," his third as writer and director, is that both impulses are up there on the screen. Sequences that delight you with their invention and wit bump up against ones of such didactic condescension that it feels as if someone is shoving a pamphlet into your hand.

Tenderness for his invented characters shares screen time with what amounts to the character assassination of real people. "Cradle Will Rock" may be the most ambitious American movie of the year; at times it's one of the most entertaining, and in many ways, it's the most appalling.

At the center of Robbins' panorama of the '30s is the story of the Federal Theatre Project's 1937 production of the Marc Blitzstein operetta "The Cradle Will Rock." An offshoot of FDR's Works Projects Administration, the FTP was intended to put theater professionals to work. Headed by Hallie Flanagan, the FTP staged numerous productions around the country, many of them with socially relevant content. None proved as explosive as "Cradle."

With Roosevelt's New Deal programs running into funding troubles in Congress and rumblings beginning about communist infiltration of the FTP, the decision by Orson Welles and John Houseman to stage Blitzstein's unabashedly pro-union musical was bound to cause a stir.

Just before the production was about to open, Congress announced budget cuts that cost thousands of FTP jobs and suspended any further productions from opening. Turning up at the theater on the day the show was scheduled to open, the cast and crew found themselves barred by federal troops from entering.

In a legendary event of modern theater, the company greeted the opening-night audience assembled outside and together they marched to a new theater that had been secured. There, barred by their unions from setting foot onstage, the cast and musicians performed from their seats in the audience, accompanied by the lone onstage figure of Blitzstein at the piano.

Obviously influenced by the style of Robert Altman's multi-character extravaganzas, Robbins has seized on this incident as the centerpiece in a carnival about the conflicts among art, politics and commerce. Fiddling with the time frame of actual events, he's made Hallie Flanagan's appearance before Rep. Martin Dies' House Un-American Activities Committee coincide with the opening of "Cradle" (it actually took place a year later).

And he's relocated from 1933 to 1937 the conflict between Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) and Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack), who commissioned the Mexican artist to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center, only to order it destroyed because of its depiction of Vladimir Lenin, among other things. (Cusack, tentatively sticking one toe in the pond of modern art, and Blades, wild-eyed and obstinate, are a pretty funny team.)

Cradle Will Rock Written and directed by Tim Robbins Starring Hank Azaria, John Cusack, Angus MacFayden, Cary Elwes, Joan Cusack, Bill Murray, Cherry Jones, Ruben Blades, Susan Sarandon, Emily Watson, John Turturro, Philip Baker Hall and Vanessa Redgrave

Other characters, real and imagined, swirl around the action. In the realm of the fictional, there's Bill Murray as a ventriloquist on his last professional legs, who gets involved with Joan Cusack as an FTP worker determined to bring the communist infiltration of the project to public awareness. And Vanessa Redgrave plays a ditzy patron of the arts whose rich husband (Philip Baker Hall) tolerates her passion but is more interested in business.

On the real side, there are the movers behind "The Cradle Will Rock," Orson Welles (Angus MacFayden), John Houseman (Cary Elwes) and Blitzstein (Hank Azaria). Emily Watson plays Olive Stanton, the aspiring actress cast in the lead of Blitzstein's operetta who, unbidden, was the first actor to rise from her seat and begin performing on the musical's opening night. And Susan Sarandon plays Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's mistress, who also wrote some pro-Duce pieces for the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst (who appears as a minor character, played by John Carpenter, in some scenes).

Robbins doesn't have the skill or the distinction to keep this circus-like atmosphere from tumbling into broadness, and when that happens all you can see is how clumsy the film is next to the screwball comedies it wants to emulate. What the film has going for it is the often ticklish silliness of all these disparate people rubbing up against one another.

In one scene Nelson Rockefeller goes to visit Diego Rivera's shabby studio-cum-apartment and finds the artist with a bevy of naked models. A few hours later, drunk on wine, Rocky's cutting the rug with them to the tune of "What a Little Moonlight Can Do."

One of the wittiest things about "Cradle Will Rock" is the way Robbins tries to blend the conventions of '30s movies into the story he's telling. Redgrave's Countess La Grange has been given a freeloading, no-talent protégé named Carlo (played by Paul Giamatti in a silly little waxed moustache) in homage to the freeloading protégé of the same name played by Mischa Auer in "My Man Godfrey." When Olive Stanton goes to apply for an FTP job but admits to having no previous theater experience, she's told this isn't a Busby Berkeley fantasy where she'll become a star -- yet she winds up starring in the production.

But Robbins doesn't pay attention to what those scenes are telling him. He appears to think that screwball comedies and musicals are entertaining enough but not very significant next to Blitzstein's operetta. He'd like us to believe that "The Cradle Will Rock" is a great work, conveniently forgotten because of its radicalism. But when we see the work performed, it's clear both why it thrilled audiences and why it hasn't survived.

To theatergoers dealing with unemployment and breadlines, keenly aware both of FDR's progressive policies and of the politicians who opposed them, seeing the forces of labor go up against the forces of capitalism in Blitzstein's operetta must have been electrifying. Part of what Robbins is responding to here is that confluence of events, performers and audiences. From his end-of-the-20th-century perspective, when politicians are still trying to shut down art they don't like, an era when the government, however briefly, actually funded political theater for an audience eager to receive its message must seem like a golden time.

Next page | Outing John Houseman