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Movie review: “Black Snake Moan”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
“Black Snake Moan” is provocative. Outrage, compassion, laughter, titillation are just some of the reactions this scandalous film from director (Hustle and Flow) Craig Brewer provokes. Some broad lines are crossed and liberties are taken with the mythologies and stereotypes of the South.
Sensitivity takes a back seat to shock for most of the action involving a woman who eventually it’s made clear was sexually abused as a child. The leading female character as a hyper-sexed, half-naked female in chains is not just an obvious outrageous reference to the Daisy Duke’s and Daisy Mae’s of male dreams, but an inside-out take on the black male as slave and exploitation fantasy of taboo desire and sexual prowess.
Rae (Christina Ricci) is a walking blues song. Drugs and promiscuity have been desecrating a life gripped by chronic emotional pain. Boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) was her ticket to salvation and sanity, but Rae’s losing her grip on the only love she’s known when the Army calls him to duty in Iraq. Once Ronnie’s out of sight, her old coping skills take over.
They leave her lying bleeding, bruised and nearly bare near the fork in a road which leads to Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson). Lazarus is no stranger to the blues. He’s just plowed under the roses his two-timing wife planted. He’s threatened his cuckolding brother with a broken beer bottle. But, as he put it to his preacher, “I never laid a hand on her in anger.”
Nevertheless, Lazarus is angry and unforgiving…at, and of, himself.
He’s in self-imposed exile from the local club where his guitar blues meant booze and broads and behavior Lazarus knows is sinful. Rae is his salvation and sanity, although he doesn’t know it yet. At first, she’s a victim needing help. Then, she’s a temptress, whose body is no temple. Brought back to Good Samaritan reality by the Good Book, Lazarus lets Rae know that he is there to salvage not just her soul, but her dignity as a human being who is more than her transgressions.
Exorcising her demons will expose him to wickedness it is his task to resist. His mission girded by righteousness and practicality, Lazarus chains Rae to the radiator. It is an outrageous sight that makes women aghast and men gasp. Flirting, raging, fighting, Rae struggles against Lazarus’s determination to make Rae see that she does have the power to “let her light shine.”
Can modesty, hope and dignity prevail over naked futility and debasement? Ricci’s no-holds-barred, body-flaunting performance is a caricature-shattering wonder and Jackson has an innate gift to portray with zealous veracity a man determined to restore his moral compass. A Paramount Vantage picture, rated R for nudity, strong sexual content, violence, language, drug use.
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