Dir: Craig Brewer

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake

 Black Snake Moan is movie that seems to have lost its courage.  The hints of infamy and scandal that emerged around the film when programmers announced the line-up for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, alas, were far more salacious—and interesting—in online blurbs (‘Christina Ricci as a nympho, chained to a radiator!’) than they turn out to be in the film.

It starts off promising, with the usual indie blueprint for success—low-rent locations, complex, troubled characters, A-list actors trying to prove they still have the chops by playing more challenging or risqué roles than their Hollywood agents might otherwise allow.  Ricci plays a white trash, foul-mouthed, foul-tempered slut named Rae and though she certainly has the attitude of trailer-park slag, she—unbelievably—also has a Pilates body.  I’ve known many a trailer-park slag, and they never looked like this.  They usually don’t have all of their discolored teeth, for one, and I don’t believe for a second that Rae would have lasted as long as she did, behaving as she does, and not have a few knocked out by a deservedly swung Coors bottle.  (They also have beer bellies and strange scars, but nevermind.)  Samuel L. Jackson is the subtly named Lazarus, a black-trash man, a little bit crazy, and has woman problems (primarily an incomprehension of them).  As a product of undereducation, where the church is one step away from voodoo, he turns to religion and, in a classic case of transference, lands upon the idea that he can make things right with his world by saving Rae.  Both characters have their own unexamined demons, a haunting that makes them do bad things: the Black Snake Moan.  Lazarus thinks that by exorcising Rae’s he can somehow exorcise his own.  That’s where the chaining of Ricci to the radiator comes in.

It sounds good so far.  Lurid subject matter, fine actors behaving unsanitarily, possibly an indie-crowd-pleasing excoriation of fundamentalist religion.  But the film seems to delve into the tropes without the depth of conviction.  What could have been a brilliant character chamber piece seems to delve into adolescent wanking material, complete with the repentance afterward.  Certainly Rae is a complex and troubled character, but we are forced away from that when she is filmed as though it was for a Playboy spread trying to be kinky (but winding up your father’s idea of kinky). Is it really necessary to have long lingering shots of her kitten-crawling across the floor trailing chains?  Or when the Black Snake Moan threatens to take her, this could have been a chilling and haunting moment, where director Craig Brewer could explore her fragile bravura and underlying vulnerability.  Instead we are offered a sexploitative overhead shot of her seductively wrapping the chains around her thighs, her writhing seeming more like a hooker’s impersonation of an orgasm than torment. 

There comes a truly captivating moment about 3/4 of the way in, where, alone in Lazarus’s hovel at night, the Black Snake Moan threatens to take them both, and Lazarus keeps it at bay by playing ‘Black Snake Moan’ on his guitar.  Outside, the lighting crashes apocalyptically, and one gets the sense that something bigger than we can know is going on.  They come together, for protection, two lost souls, and together they can do battle.  It is the most powerful moment in the film, and it should have ended there, on a note as eerie as in Night of the Hunter.  The mystery did not need to be explained.  We, like the characters, did not need to know how, just that it took trusting each other to do it.  But the film loses courage catapults into Hollywood bathos and family values.  Lazarus finds the love of good woman and Rae gives up her whorish ways and learns to understand her erstwhile man, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake).  At the wedding, we go from a shot of the happy, non-racially integrated kids to the smiling, non-racially integrated adults and actually—shamelessly—tilt down to see them holding hands.  At this point I let out my own Black Snake Moan.  All has been restored to status quo, all danger, all mysticism neutered.  All the promise of complex characterizations, muddy motives, and situations without easy solutions has come to naught.

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