>>REVIEW
BLACK SNAKE MOAN
STARRING Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake
DIRECTED BY Craig Brewer
Opens Friday, March 2
Check listings
Christina Ricci topless, bound in chains. For a considerable segment of its audience, that reason alone will be enough to eagerly hand over cash for tickets to Black Snake Moan. Add in Samuel L. Jackson playing a gruff, love-hardened former blues star and the damn thing seems like a sure bet. However, just like any good bluesman will tell you about love, a dismal end will ruin even the best beginning.
Lou Reed sang about a girl whose life was saved by rock ’n’ roll, and in Black Snake Moan writer/director Craig Brewer has made a film about a girl whose life is saved by the blues, or at least a bluesman. Freshly stung by love after his ex-wife has run off with his brother, Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) wakes from a particularly hard-drinking night to find a badly beaten woman lying by the side of the road. Taken to nymphomaniac fits, Rae (Christina Ricci) becomes the older man’s pet project as he tries to cure her "of her wicked ways," chaining her to his home.
Often defying common sense in the face of better entertainment, the movie’s slapdash plotting is at its best when the movie refuses to apologize for itself. Seeing Rae emerge from the bathroom after putting on a new dress – a physical impossibility given the giant chain wrapped tightly around her midriff – Lazarus asks simply, "The chain didn’t bother you none, did it?" No movie whose posters feature a chained and scantily clad girl clutching Jackson’s leg like a damsel in distress on a Conan movie poster could be anything but pulp, and that’s what Black Snake Moan delivers in spades for its first half.
So long as Rae remains bound, Brewer lays on the hyperbolic southern charm (though he’s from California) and makes Lazarus a gruff bundle of emotional scar tissue lovable enough that chaining a girl doesn’t make him seem like a soulless sexual predator.
Then the chain comes off and Brewer doesn’t seem sure exactly what to do with his story, bringing back Rae’s panic attack-afflicted boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) to resolve a troubled-romance subplot too flat to compete with Jackson’s growling messiah complex. With Rae’s sexual fits portrayed as the direct result of childhood sexual abuse, the movie’s second half is an unwieldy mixture of soft crying and emotional trauma, even trying to introduce "This Little Light of Mine" as a motif in two scenes before it’s used again for the last time.
Half pulp and half hasty psych 101, Black Snake Moan has more promise than delivery. With a topless Ricci and gruff Jackson, that’s more than enough to make hopeful audiences sing the blues. |
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