Cinema: Cradle Will Rock

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STARRING: Ruben Blades, John Cusack, Cary Elwes, Cherry Jones, Angus MacFayden, Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, Emily Watson DIRECTOR: Tim Robbins OPENS: Dec. 8 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide Dec. 25

No age was so towering that a cynic looking back could not have contempt for it. To re-create the bustling, politically contentious '30s, when a young Orson Welles tried to stage the socialist musical The Cradle Will Rock with federal funding, Robbins has splashed a couple of dozen real people onto a garish movie mural, Diego Rivera-style. While Welles (MacFayden) and producer John Houseman (Elwes) try to persuade their government patron (Jones) not to cancel the show, Nelson Rockefeller (Cusack) romances Rivera (Blades), then literally trashes his work. There's also a young actress (Watson), an old ventriloquist (Murray), a swank saleswoman for fascism (Sarandon)--just about anyone who was alive then, and dabbling in the arts, is in this too-much of a movie.

How could it have failed? With a smugness that smothers the actors' energy and obliterates the historical reality. Welles is a pompous oaf, and Houseman his toady. The rich are scheming, the poor artists cliches of do-gooder striving. These are caricatures drawn so violently that one sees blotches of ink instead of quick, deft lines. Perhaps, in the long view, we are all idiots. But we don't need a 60-year perspective to see Robbins' attitude revealed in all its meanness of spirit. If he hated these people so, why did he waste his time and ours putting them on film?

--R.C.