Black Snake Moan
Directed by Craig Brewer
No doubt writer/director Craig Brewer, whose debut feature was Hustle and Flow, means well. His taste for low-down ribaldry gives him access to a sympathetic observation of thwarted lives that are a genuine but usually ignored part of American experience. He’s a Tarantino with his feet on Southern ground instead of his head up the ass of Hollywood/Hong Kong junk. But Brewer’s intentions are misdirected in Black Snake Moan’s tale of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), a black Georgia bean farmer whose wife dumps him for his younger brother. Lazarus’ frustrations have already wearied him when he takes-in a victimized white girl, Rae (Christina Ricci) and tries curing her nymphomania. (“God seen fit to put you in my path, and I aim to cure you of your sickness.”)
Brewer’s gimmick is so outrageous it ought to be comedy—perhaps a modern version of the Elia Kazan-Tennesee Williams’ Baby Doll but fearlessly igniting interracial fireworks. Yet Brewer stops short of racial outrage; not because there’s none left in today’s multiracial America, he simply denies that it ever existed. Despite much teasing, Lazarus and Rae’s relationship remains chaste. Lazarus chains Rae to his radiator so she can’t escape his down-home teaching—a combo of Pygmalion and Somerset Maugham’s Rain. When Rae tries to escape, and the short chain snaps her back, the movie suggests a porno-religious Road Runner cartoon—customized for cynics who underestimate the social dynamics of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
It’s depressing that Brewer dares salacious irony and then backs down. Black Snake Moan’s posters, styled after the sensationalized artwork of old paperback novels by Kyle Onstott and Frank Yerby, are livelier than anything the movie actually offers. Brewer speciously evokes the blues, opening with doc footage of Son House explaining that the blues “exists between the male and female … when one deceives the othern through the love.” But Lazarus and Rae’s relationship is closer to Bill Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple—if Shirley Temple gyrated in a Luther Campbell video. Brewer’s use of raunchy, S&M archetypes sputters out, especially with the casting of I’ll-do-anything performers like Jackson and Ricci whose unprincipled careers deny all transgressive possibilities.
Jackson never does anything that’ll make racists uncomfortable. The only black male stereotype he’s avoided is the Mandingo stud—for the fortunate reason that he’s the least erotic black actor in movies. Always stopping short of the ultimate miscegenation fear, Jackson’s participation in Brewer’s scheme cannot exorcize the demons of American racism. And Ricci has already played slut too many times; she drops her T-shirt but raises no one’s eyebrow. She also gets Brewer’s worst dialogue: When Rae reforms, she sings “This Little Light of Mine” and puzzles, “I can’t remember where I learned that song?”—a sign that Brewer’s entire conceit (ignoring/falsifying Southern religious heritage) is disingenuous. (The worst insult may be Jackson’s improvising the classic folk song “Stagolee” with a vacancy of rhythm and soul: “I said, ‘Hey muthafucka do you know who I am?’/He said, ‘Naw, n---a I don’t give a damn.’”)
Brewer is a wannabe poet of the Southern underclass. He has a pop sensibility that even Ira Sachs lacked in The Delta and 40 Shades of Blue (and his heart is in the tiny subplot featuring Justin Timberlake as Rae’s military-dropout boyfriend—a poignantly played role that deserves the interracial camaraderie and soulfulness of a Timberlake CD). But Brewer plays with porn tropes that unhelpfully turn racism into a fetish. He uses the same themes of suffering, dysfunction and redemption as Demme’s Beloved and Walter Hill’s Crossroads, yet misses the vital sense of a community’s spiritual ambition. His characters lack the Toni Morrison/August Wilson sense of historical connection.
Black Snake Moan is so full of bad ideas and misrepresented ethnicity that people who are ignorant of black Southern culture, or feel nothing for it, will misread the film’s blunders as daring provocation.
