Hi 75 / Lo 59
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Volume 72, Issue 101,
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Life & Arts Sink your teeth into ‘Black Snake' Graphic film has appearance of a sex-romped thriller, but delivers an absorbing story on personal relations by MONICA GRANGER
Craig Brewer's film Black Snake Moan, which was written during his downtime while frantically pitching the award-winning Hustle & Flow. It's witty, gritty and impudently sexual without distracting from the intricate story line and theme of mutual human betterment. Marketing for the movie focuses mostly on the seedy implications of a black man binding a white woman to him by chain. Movie posters, reminiscent of steamy 1950s paperbacks promising illicit sex, depict Samuel L. Jackson looming upright in a dingy wife-beater over a tiny, blonde Christina Ricci who sits sideways to the camera. The movie is much more than the posters suggest, however. Jackson and Ricci co-star in Black Snake Moan, a story about a God-fearing man and young wild woman. Lazarus is a recently separated, black, blues-playing farmer, and Rae is a white nymphomaniac whose boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) leaves her high and dry when he leaves to serve in the Army. Rae has a nymphomaniac attack almost immediately after his departure and the audience becomes acutely aware that the sexual tension here is not a joke. Brewer captures the crippling truth of the disease vividly, while deftly pointing to ties between human dignity, respect and sex, as well as criticizing sexual abusers. The audience learns Lazarus is married, but his wife Rose is leaving him for someone richer. After a very short drinking stint, he starts to void his house of Rose's presence in a stoic, resigned, bluesman kind of way. It is on a trip to the garbage that he finds Rae, carries her back to his home and begins nursing the now-beaten and feverish half-naked girl back to health. All of a sudden, Lazarus has Rae chained to his radiator with a 60-pound chain. The chain sends Rae into a fury when she awakens, and Brewer and crew capture the jarring horror of this discovery perfectly in a driving, syncopated and funny segment. The movie turns humorous as various characters discover Rae, and the doorway to the redemption theme yawns wider as Lazarus' preacher friend plays a larger role. A Blind Lemon Jefferson song from the 1920s is the source of the film's name. Jackson also lends his voice to the soundtrack. The characters grow together organically and dynamically as the crisis reaches a critical edge where each character must decide to step forward to joy or remain mired in past failures. Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu |
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