Black Snake Moan

by Ari

 
Writer-director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is fairly standard and conventional storytelling about love and redemption, with nothing interesting, profound, or even remotely realistic to say. Repetitive and tedious when it’s not completely ludicrous or painfully exploitative, Brewer’s second feature attempts to riff on genre filmmaking in hopes of turning the absurdity into actual drama, which of course results in unintentionally amusing and often times offensive material. While Brewer effectively uses the Blues to create the somber tone of the story, his thinly developed characters and seriously questionable premise keep the emotion a long distance away. Black Snake Moan is sexploitation meets soap opera - an experiment that comes off as a slightly deranged male sex fantasy until it decides to try to make a point about the transcendent quality of love. As previously stated, it’s quite conventional and surprisingly dull. For all its stylistic touches and lively music, the film amounts to the exact same conclusions you’ve seen hundreds of times before in equally tiresome and generic love stories and mainstream dramas. Add on the flagrant amount of misogyny and you have one of the most immature and nonsensical films in quite some time.

Rae (Christina Ricci) suffers from spells that leave her with an uncontrollable urge to have sex. After her boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) leaves for the military, Rae is alone and without comfort, resorting to frequent sex with strangers to calm the storm that brews within her soul. As one lovely character puts it, “she has the itch”. So after she’s raped, beaten up, and dumped on the side of the road, a troubled bluesman called Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) takes her into his home to heal her wounds. Lazarus’ wife has left him for his younger brother, so he’s down and depressed and looking for some cleansing and freedom himself. Once he finds out about Rae’s sickness, he decides to “cure her of her wickedness”, or something along those lines. Either way, it’s absurd and imbecilic, more interested in Ricci’s sudden and heated sexual episodes than building characters with actual humanity. Two things about this scenario are particularly offensive: 1) the film tries very hard to be sexy - which only seems in bad taste considering it’s supposed to be about redeeming this character. And 2) the film takes entirely too much pleasure with the idea of chaining a woman like a slave and watching her react to the situation.

Instead of being disturbed or challenged by the premise, the filmmakers would like you to howl and laugh at the events on display. Things become even stranger as the story progresses, abandoning the dynamic between Lazarus and Rae for what can only be best described as the usual Hollywood ending. So really, what’s the point? The actors do admirable jobs with their material, especially Jackson as the only interesting character in the film. Jackson is a talented actor, and there’s certainly a level of satisfaction in watching him do his own singing (which is really quite good). The two strongest sequences involve him performing - one song for Rae during a thunderstorm, and a series of songs for a large audience at a club. Ricci is unfortunately reduced to mostly shaking her body and moaning.

This type of exploitation is not compelling, original, or enticing, it’s just ugly.