BLACK SNAKE MOAN Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Paramount Vantage
Grade: B
Directed by: Craig Brewer
Written By: Craig Brewer
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake, S.
Epatha Merkerson, John Cothran Jr., David Banner, Michael
Raymond-James, Amy Lavere, Kim Richards
Screened at: AMC 34th St., NYC, 3/4/07
Opens: February 23, 2007 Every time I see a movie about goings-about in a Red State, I’m glad to be a New Yorker. “Black Snake Moan, which was filmed in Stanton, Tennessee (average cost of a house $29,400), pictures a dive of a place filled with people who either sit on their cans, paunches out, watching their little world go by, or actively drinking, drugging, whoring, pimping, raping, beating up on others, breaking up a marriage, stacking junk food at minimum wage, discharged from the army because of anxiety attacks, or ultimately in just a couple of cases, maybe, being redeemed. Temporarily. “Black Snake Moan” could be taken a fantasy, as a take-off on Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” ("Lov Bensey trudged homeward through the deep white sand of the gully-washed tobacco road with a sack of winter turnips on his back...") or on Tennessee Williams’s “Baby Doll” (“A voluptuous girl under twenty is asleep with the cover thrown off...this is baby doll Meighan, Archie Lee’s virgin wife.”) Its female star is Christina Ricci, whom I never before thought to be sexy, but whom Todd McCarthy of Variety calls in his review of this pic “a feral animal, a force of nature, a wild thing with a ferocious physicality and a sexuality like Vesuvius in its prime, Eros unplugged, unquenchable, inexhaustible...never so bluntly portrayed in a Hollywood studio film.” “Black Snake Moan,” which is the title of one of the many songs in a blues-infused movie almost two hours in length–and one sung by Samuel L. Jackson himself as directed by “Hustle and Flow” helmer Craig Brewer–is about the redemption of two individuals. One, Rae (Christina Ricci), is a girl of about twenty who was raped as a kid, rejected by her mother, a druggie and nymphomaniac ready to give a man anything he wants for some affection. The other, Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), is a farmer some thirty-five years old, his marriage just broken up and on his way to becoming rudderless. When Lazarus finds Rae half naked and unconscious in the road, having been beate by an acquaintance of her own boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), who had just been assigned to go to Iraq, he takes her into his home and chains her to his radiator, determined, as he states, to cure her of her wildness. Rae appears to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At first she’s shocked by her condition; she becomes furious and demands her freedom; she offers herself to Lazarus, without success; she’s wraps herself around her chains as though to restrain her own impulses, or “itch” to have sex; then simmers down to discuss her plight more rationally with her captor until she predictably enough bonds with him. (This could be yet another movie embracing a male fantasy.) Jackson plays some mean guitar, knocking out a few songs for his audience, finds a pharmacist, Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson) who is far friendlier to him than his wife and promises to be more compatible, and secures the assistance of his old friend, the town preacher (John Cothran Jr.) to easy his way toward a personal resurrection. Though the story could have been told in fifteen minutes’ less time and is elongated by music, the blues, particularly those ballads sung by Mr. Jackson himself, add to the film’s pleasure. Best of all, though is the traditional tune sung by Ms. Ricci “This Little Light of Mine,” which helps film reviewers in their dotage like me to image themselves back in the glorious days of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Weavers, and Tom Lehrer.
Rated R. 115 minutes 2007 by Harvey Karten
Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
