Black Snake Moan (2006) Movie Review
It’s only right that a movie paying tribute to the incantatory, perfervid nature of Blues music should tread the outer edges of reality, transfiguring familiar tropes of the genre – the girl who personifies lust unleashed, the martyred howl of a betrayed husband – into actual characters and situations. Black Snake Moan, Craig Brewer’s follow-up to his marvellous Hustle and Flow (2005), attempts to evoke the mood of the Blues, that tinny, simplistic, utterly compelling pseudo-folk style that broadcasts from the outer edges of the consciousness as much as it does from the real world of being poor, Black, and pissed off.
It gives Sam Jackson and Christina Ricci the parts of their lives, as a busted-luck ex-bluesman, whose wife has left him for his brother, determined to save self-destructive waif Ricci from herself when she spirals out of control following her boyfriend’s (Justin Timberlake) going off to boot camp. She’s the girl with the red-hot tamales who’s got a hell-hound on her trail, and Jackson’s the backwoods preacher man ready to do battle with her demons by chaining her to the radiator to unchain her heart.
Director Brewer aims for the far reaches of blood-gorged Southron melodrama, tempered with a generally positive arc of redemption and revitalisation. It takes aim at the homogeneity of contemporary American culture; in moments like when, appalled by her mother’s contempt for her, Ricci does not break down in tears but instead bashes her with a broom, it represents the ultimate rejection of Oprah-ised cuddliness and the embrace of Jerry Springer anarchy.
Some sequences, as when Ricci furls herself in the chain and sleeps likes a perverse Eve entwined with her private serpent, and when Jackson and Ricci decide to confront their demons by heading into a juke joint and grinding out some evil moves, are astounding, and nearly send Black Snake Moan towards freak-out classic status. Jackson’s rendition of “Stack-O-Lee” is worth an Oscar on its own.
But Brewer’s story hews to some familiar lines. The problem with Black Snake Moan in the end isn’t that it’s trashy and bizarre; it’s that it isn’t quite trashy and bizarre enough, never really flies off the handle as much as it hints it will, eventually washing up not too great a distance from The Spitfire Grill or The Shipping News as a cheering tale of outsiders muddling through. Hustle and Flow had a more clever arrival at a defiantly happy ending, though both films share Brewer’s original, anarchic take on American social canards, and it’s got an energy, a richness of scope, and a palette immune to the strictures of good taste, that dwarfs the likes of Paul Haggis and the Coen Brothers in its take on the ghost-dreams of old Americana.
