MOVIE REVIEW: 'Black Snake Moan'


From today's Oregonian ....



"Black Snake Moan" is a gorgeous, life-affirming movie. On paper, it sounds lurid bordering on ridiculous.

Here's the story: A pill-popping nymphomaniac named Rae (Christina Ricci) loses her panic-attack-suffering boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) when he joins the Army. Her safety net gone, Rae goes on a bender. After one wild party, she's savagely beaten and dumped on the side of the road, wearing only her panties and a half-shirt emblazoned with a Confederate flag.

The next morning, she's found by a hung-over, blues-singing farmer named Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) whose wife just left him for his younger brother.

Lazarus promptly chains Rae to his radiator -- at first to corral her sleepwalking, but later out of a crazed Biblical conviction that he can cure her "wickedness."

From there, it gets … complicated. Soon, Rae is wrapping herself in chains to calm her "fever," the radiator clanging like a church bell.

I know: ridiculous. And the raw imagery is loaded like an M-60. I didn't even mention the sweat-soaked blues sessions (sung by Jackson, who's incredible) or the operatic flashes of lightning, or scenes like the one where Lazarus takes his scantily clad, chained-up charge on a walk through the cornfields.

But none of this is what makes "Black Snake Moan" truly shocking.

The real shock is that writer-director Craig Brewer pulls off the same miracle he pulled off with 2005's "Hustle & Flow": He takes raw exploitation material about occasionally ugly people, then turns it into human drama that's smart, powerfully alive and occasionally very funny.

And despite its rawness, "Moan" is also one of the best movies about love and faith that I've seen in ages.

The movie is -- dare I say it? -- full of Christian charity: It has a lot more to say about forgiveness than anything "Fox Faith" will release this year. (One of the film's best speeches comes when Lazarus' best friend and pastor (John Cothran Jr.), drawn into the wickedness-curing effort, explains to Rae why "all-you-can-eat buffet" notions of a far-off Heaven can't help us in the here and now.)

Of course, the ideas wouldn't matter if the movie didn't rock the fundamentals. And it does. The soundtrack is killer. The filmmaking has a potent '70s flavor. And Brewer has once again filmed Tennessee so vividly, you can practically feel the weather rolling in.

Ricci and Jackson are combustible; each actor gives something close to a career performance. But the beating heart of the film can actually be traced to Ricci and Timberlake (who's shockingly good here). Rae and her beau are two deeply messed-up people who comfort each other at their worst. And the movie -- in its own steamy, Southern-fried way -- argues that true love can be found in the way that messed-up people act as each other's Band-Aids.

Oregonian movie reviews (OregonLive.com)

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Posted: Fri - March 2, 2007 at 12:00 AM        

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