Black Snake Moan

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here, with my personal favorite film from BNAT8. With his previous film Hustle & Flow, writer-director Craig Brewer was not attempting to make a film about a pimp trying to make it as a hip-hop artist. He was making a film about the essence of great hip-hop music. Almost without exception, great hip-hop songs come from someone who has lived the experiences laid out in the music. As top-notch as your production may be, ultimately rap music lives or dies by the authenticity of its lyrics. With his latest, and far superior and more provocative film, Black Snake Moan, Brewer gives us not just a story about a long-retired blues man, but also a tale about what makes a middle-aged black man, deliberately named Lazarus, find what it is in himself that made him love and embrace the blues so dearly many years earlier. I'm sure he never guessed that a half-naked, skinny, nymphomaniac white girl would be his salvation.

Samuel L. Jackson (in his finest performance in more than a decade) is Lazarus, a one-time Tennessee blues man whose wife has just left him for his younger brother. He's angry and shattered by the development. The badly beaten, unconscious Rae (Christina Ricci) is left for dead near his driveway. He attempts to nurse the girl back to health, and while in town collecting medicine and other supplies, he finds out a thing or two about Rae's wicked ways. Her boyfriend (played beautifully by Justin Timberlake) has made many promises about their future, but only after he ships off to bootcamp (and presumably Iraq several months later). In the wake of his leaving, Rae goes on a sexual and alcoholic bender. She also has epileptic-like seizures that can only be ceased with sex.

Lazarus takes on the girl's soul as a project, and he is determined to cure her of her wicked ways by keeping her under his care, reading her Bible verses, and simply showing her the kindness of a stranger who is not trying to have sex with her. To make sure she stays put until the job is done, he chains her to his radiator. My guess is that, if you knew anything about this film before today, this chaining business was a part of what you knew, maybe the only part. Craig Brewer is no dummy; he knows he's being provocative with this set up. And make no mistake, the chaining all happens fairly early in the story, but Ricci isn't in chains long. But in the time she is held captive, she does everything in her power to escape. I know a lot of actresses get labeled "brave" for taking their clothes off in films, but Ricci is downright fearless with her body and the label might stick with this performance.

But after the dust and boobies settle, it becomes clearer what Black Snake Moan is really about, which is, of course, Lazarus' personal redemption and his rediscovery of the things in his life that once made him a better man and a terrifying musician. Brewer drenches his subjects in blues folklore and culture, and you leave this film feeling both educated and invigorated. Black Snake Moan is a deeply spiritual piece, and as strange as it might sound, I could see some churchgoers finding many positive lessons about salvation in several scenes in this work. The course this film takes and the way it leads the audience is unexpected and wonderful, and bless Craig Brewer for carving out this music-fueled niche for himself in the film universe and teaching us not just about playing music but about what inspires those who create it. The year is young, I know, but this is my favorite movie of 2007 so far.

Capone

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