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Black Snake Moan review
:. Director: Craig Brewer
:. Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci
:. Running Time: 1:56
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: USA
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As Rose prepares to leave her husband Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) for his brother, and before he begins his pleas for her to stay, she invokes the temperature: Their house is too hot. A modest, one-story structure in the seclusion of the Tennessee countryside, it's a paltry home; when we're first allowed inside, it seems large enough for only one person, and we can't imagine how two could have spent so many love-torn years living within.
Their house, and in particular its hard-worn radiator, become the near immediate focus of writer-director Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan. When Lazarus finds Rae (Christina Ricci), an unconscious and half-beaten "dirty blonde" lying by the side of the road, he takes her in and mends her wounds. When she begins wandering, terrified by hallucinatory nightmares, and one night finds herself in Lazarus's garden, he binds her to the radiator with a forty-pound chain.
Rae, as we already know, is a nymphomaniac. With boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) on his way to Iraq, her sickness drives her to solicit sex from friends and strangers alike. One is a local goon named Tyrone; another is an anonymous partygoer she meets only hours after kissing Ronnie goodbye. It's Ronnie's best friend Gill (Michael Raymond-James) who beats her lifeless after she spurns his advances and, thinking she's dead, dumps her body.
Curing Rae of her compulsions becomes Lazarus' mission. Determined to heal her with deprivation, it seems as though he's tapped into a sense of common morality, of compassion arising from a strong religious drive. But the truth seems much simpler. By binding Rae to the radiator, Lazarus is making a connection between her and Rose; she left him with a scathing remark about their home's temperature, and Rae is prevented from fleeing by an immobile, reliable appliance.
Brewer's characters seem torn from the stories of Flannery O'Connor; they are damaged, forsaken, overtly trusting yet incurably distant, lost in a world of omnipotent isolation. A warm-hearted pharmacist named Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson) and a preacher named R.L. (John Cothran Jr.) are among the menagerie of multifaceted Southern characters who intersect Lazarus on his mission, though they all appear alone. A confrontation between Rae and her mother in a supermarket aisle personifies the rabid seclusion of her impulse, as well as where it all began; the altercation also reveals Lazarus and Rae's relationship to the town, and suddenly his loneliness becomes more appealing.
Brewer also knows how to draw feelings of discomfort from the beautiful, gothic imagery of his film. Amid shots of Rae sprawled out against the floor, windows framing the flicker of a thunderstorm, and Lazarus singing the blues in a local tavern are images that could easily be seen as commentaries on race relations: Rae, scrawny and pasty and exposed, bound to a radiator by an older African-American man, elicits an incredible number of mixed feelings. Yet the explicit content of Black Snake Moan only enhances a storyline that could easily have become stale and repetitive. Brewer, whose last film was the uncompromising Hustle & Flow, has managed to create an atypical, even bizarre film that doesn't exclude the audience, and gives us two great performances: Jackson's performance is his best in years, and Ricci's transformation from round-faced Wednesday Addams to curvy, wide-eyed sexpot Rae is astounding.
Adam Balz
 Movie Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Movie Reviews: 2012 - present
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