Black Snake Moan
A middle-aged black man in the rural South finds a beaten-up, half-naked young white woman on the gravel road to his house and takes her home. Discovering that she’s a nymphomaniac, he chains her to his radiator. This is the hook that distributor Paramount Vantage, presumably with the blessing of director Craig Brewer, has used to sell “Black Snake Moan,” and it’s hard to blame them. But it doesn’t come close to capturing the soul of Brewer’s movie, a daring and emotionally rich follow-up to “Hustle & Flow.” Brewer’s overrated debut argued that everybody deserves a shot at redemption, even a sleazy, violent pimp, but despite the down-low, pulsating crunk soundtrack and Terrence Howard’s soulful performance, “Hustle & Flow” never communicates why this guy is worth rooting for. It doesn’t create much of a struggle for him. He wants to be a rapper, and he becomes one. And when he gets into the recording studio, he whines about how difficult his day job is. “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” was a catchy song and a deserving Oscar winner, but it was hard for me to embrace a filmmaker who embraces a slogan like that without a shred of irony.
“Black Snake Moan,” though, brings into focus Brewer’s strategy of using the trappings of the exploitation film to tell an uplifting, even heartwarming story. The marketing campaign won’t prepare you for the depth and specificity with which Brewer establishes his main characters. Both are raw with grief before they meet. Rae (Christina Ricci), for whom sex is a means of dulling the pain of an abusive upbringing, goes into a tailspin after her boyfriend (Justin Timberlake), a National Guard soldier, is deployed, rupturing the stability and symbiosis of their relationship. God-fearing farmer and former bluesman Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) endures the double indignity of his wife leaving him — for his brother. Brewer crosscuts between them, tracking their parallel descents, until Rae is beaten to near-death by her boyfriend’s insecure, loathsome buddy (Michael Raymond-James) and Lazarus finds her.
By the time he puts a chain around Rae’s waist, we’re pretty sure it’s not for a sadistic sex ritual. He says he wants to cure her of her wickendess, and it’s a credit to Jackson’s and Brewer’s conviction that we believe him. Exciting twists remain, some down-and-dirty, some tender and gentle — like Lazarus’s courtly romance with a phramacist (S. Epatha Merkeson). Despite the looming threat of violence and the overheated sensuality, the overall trend of the picture is a sunny one. Ricci has matured into a dynamite actor. In “Monster” and “Black Snake Moan,” she has brought a bristling emotional honesty to uneducated, sexually adventurous young women who can’t verbalize their desires or their demons. They don’t need to: We can read everything on Ricci’s face.
Perhaps Brewer’s most exciting skill is his ability to advance the story through music — in a sense, both “Hustle & Flow” and “Black Snake Moan” are musicals, the latter a valentine to the blues and the sexual longing that fuels it. His actors find their emotional high points in song — and they do it organically, unlike in the overwrought Broadway adaptations that have found their way onto screens in recent years. Ricci and Jackson summon crescendoes of feeling through music, and since Brewer finds plausible reasons for them to sing, it doesn’t take you out of the movie. Instead, the snake wraps you tighter in its grip.