Beyond the Multiplex

Christina Ricci wows opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake in the exhilarating "Black Snake Moan." Plus: The film stubborn Bush supporters need to see.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Beyond the Multiplex

Rae (Christina Ricci) and Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) in "Black Snake Moan"

Jan. 26, 2007 | PARK CITY, Utah -- Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake both promised the audience they're not giving up their day jobs (or swapping careers). Christina Ricci's comments were more of the gosh, gee-whiz, glad-to-be-here variety, but she looked smashing in a form-fitting Audrey Hepburn-style gray sweater-dress. That's about twice as much clothing as she wears at any point in writer-director Craig Brewer's richly lurid Southern melodrama, "Black Snake Moan," which premiered here on Wednesday night before a packed, ecstatic house of 1,200 people in the Eccles Theatre.

Tickets for the "Black Snake Moan" premiere were commodities much sought after and bargained over this week at Sundance. It's difficult to calculate a film's merits while enveloped in celebrity endorphins and the clicking of a thousand camera phones, but let's just say the audience turned up determined to have a good time and was not disappointed. Given its cast, its title and its outrageous premise, Brewer's movie would have had little trouble garnering media attention with or without Sundance, but his breakthrough hit "Hustle & Flow" was launched here two years ago, and he seemed genuinely thrilled to be back.

Before we got to all the multiracial, good-natured Memphis joshing and gushing sincerity of the onstage Q&A session ("Justin, what challenges do you face in making the transition from singer to actor?"), we all sat attentively through a two-hour movie. It was pretty damn good! A memorable work of art? Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's more an ingenious and stylish entertainment, "Pulp Fiction" with a Southern accent and a heart of gold, driven by both love of the Lord and a certain affection for the other fella. Any movie in which Jackson plays a guy who keeps the town slut chained to his radiator, wearing nothing but a Rebel flag T-shirt and a pair of panties, has got a different tradition than "art" in view.

Like everybody else here, I couldn't help thinking about the instructive similarities -- and even more instructive differences -- between this film and the much-derided "Hounddog," Sundance's biggest stink bomb to date. Both pictures are drawing from the same deep well, trying to create something new from the mythic materials of the rural South: race, sex, sin, redemption and the blues. But "Hounddog" gets stuck in a depressive poker-faced realism (that never actually feels real), while "Black Snake Moan," through sheer pulpy outrageousness, through its reverence for both the sacred and the profane, is more powerful, more dangerous and, paradoxically, closer to real life.

Let's get back to those chains. Yes, it's true that Lazarus (Jackson), an embittered sharecropper and semiretired bluesman whose wife has run off with his brother, keeps Rae (Ricci), a girl known throughout the county for her generosity, chained up and padlocked in his house for much of the film. It isn't quite what you think. The key to melodrama is to invent outlandish situations and play them straight, giving the characters as much dignity and integrity as you can. Lazarus has the purest of intentions toward Rae -- better than any other guy in town, anyway -- and when he finally unlocks her, it's not clear how much she wants to leave.

As the cloudy-hearted Lazarus, Jackson has all the gravity and darkness you expect from him, but "Black Snake Moan" really belongs to Ricci. Rae moves through the movie like a weather system or a small but angry wild animal, spitting bile and invective wherever she goes. During and after the opening credits, she gives a trucker the finger and invites a street heckler to "kiss my Rebel coochie, faggot." She's playing a compulsive nymphomaniac and is nearly naked for most of the film, but the extraordinary thing about Ricci's performance is how non-exploitative and unprurient it is.

Some viewers will doubtless disagree, but I see no misogyny at the heart of "Black Snake Moan." It depicts a misogynist society, one that has beaten, shamed and victimized Rae all her life. But if that society has warped Rae's self-image, it has not vanquished her spirit. Both she and Lazarus may be trapped in dime-novel situations, separately and together, but they nonetheless are complicated, fleshed-out characters, marred by self-hatred and stiffened by pride.

Rae's fiancé, Ronnie (Timberlake, who gives a straightforward, unaffected performance), has gone off to the Army and presumably to Iraq. Rae loves him, but when it comes to other guys she literally can't help herself. She seems to be overcome by physical seizures of lust, desires she doesn't welcome but can't control.

Rae and Lazarus find each other at a point when both badly need someone. They're haunted by bad memories and bent on self-destruction. She assumes he just wants what every man wants from her; he believes God has made him the instrument of her salvation. They're both partly right and partly wrong, but let's not go any deeper than that. Except to point out that Jackson sings and plays a couple of convincing and truly evil blues numbers, including the title song, performed during a lightning storm as Ricci's Rae clings to his knee, wide-eyed.

I don't know whether "Black Snake Moan" is really an independent film, or even what that question means at this point. But it's a true rarity, a picture made for grown-ups that combines vibrant, color-drenched cinematography (by Amelia Vincent), grand narrative ambitions and a desire to thrill. There are a few undercooked characters (Timberlake's among them) and some bits of canned dirty-South color. Then again, this isn't meant to be a gravy-stained depiction of life below the Mason-Dixon exactly as it is today. Instead, it's a blast of energy, an exhilarating pop culture moment that combines (as Brewer says) a drive-in aesthetic and deep mythological roots. Hell, yeah.

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