HomeReviewing the Reviews: 'Black Snake Moan'
Mar 2, 2007, 10:54 AM | by Mandi Bierly
Categories: Film, Reviewing the Reviews
Sorry, you'll just have to see this movie for yourself. The critics are split.
In case you weren't mentally scarred from the trailer, let's start with a plot summary from EW's own Lisa Schwarzbaum: "In Black Snake Moan, Christina Ricci [pictured] plays Rae, a backwoods Tennessee baby doll who's been done wrong all her life — beginning with her daddy's dirty hands — and that's why she's now a raging nymphomaniac: When Rae's one true love, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake, Renaissance man!), ships off to Army boot camp, she's instantly itchier and wilder than a cat on a hot tin movie set. To quote the precise medical diagnosis of one of the townsfolk: 'She got dat sickness. She gotta get d--- or she go crazy.' Stat! Samuel L. Jackson plays Lazarus, a Memphis musician who's been done wrong by his wife — she's run off with Laz's brother — and that's why he has stopped singing God's gift of the blues and done taken up religion. Rae's angry, he's angrier. She's white, tiny, and near-naked; he's big, black, and clothed in righteousness, telling her, 'I aim to cure you of your wickedness. You sick. You gonna mahhhhnd me.' He chains her to a radiator for her own good and sings to her, and she comes to love him for it and... huh?"
While some critics unabashedly praise this film from Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer (like Kevin Smith, who called it "about as fine a piece of Southern Gothic as you'll ever see, right up there with anything written by William Faulkner, Harper Lee or Tennessee Williams" while serving as a guest reviewer on Ebert & Roeper), others such as the Arizona Daily Star's Phil Villarreal do so almost apologetically. "Believe it or not, all this is the setup for a sweet surrogate-father-daughter coming-of-age film. You can despise Brewer for his choice of subject material...but not his abilities as a storyteller. He has an eye and ear for luscious detail, and his nonsensical, drawling dialogue flows from Jackson's mouth like angelic poetry."
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir stands in Villarreal's corner: "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." Slate Magazine's Dana Stevens, not so much. "I guarantee that the words provocative, bold, and courageous will be bandied about in discussions of this movie, and they won't be entirely misplaced... But can we just start with something very basic here? Chaining someone to your radiator is wrong. Depriving a near-naked and recently assaulted stranger of the most basic physical liberty for days on end is a sick, perverse, and cruel thing to do. Black Snake Moan appears to be — or, worse, pretends to be — oblivious to that simple fact. And that obliviousness makes all of the movie's supposed risk-taking seem more like exploitation." (Slant's Nick Schager doesn't see that as a problem, calling the film, "exploitation cinema of the grungiest, nastiest, and thus finest order, delivering a volatile batch of extreme sex, extreme profanity, and — most of all — extreme racial and gender dynamics.")
What can we all agree on? That USA Today's Claudia Plug momentarily loses some credibility when she says, "In Black Snake Moan, set in the Tennessee backwoods, Jackson's role is worlds away from his sharp, sophisticated law enforcement character in Snakes on a Plane." ("Sharp, sophisticated"?) And that The Village Voice's Rob Nelson had a good time writing his review. Under the headline "Hussy 'N' Flow: God-fearing black man tames slutty white girl as Craig Brewer's South rises again," he writes: "Indeed, long stretches of Brewer's Suthun-fried sophomore slump come down the country road lookin' as haggard as a workaholic ho on a Sunday morning. (Yes, this review is a piece of exploitation, too.)... For Lazarus (or Brewer), scrubbing this bad girl's soul means not subjecting her to slavery so much as getting her to work in the kitchen, to sing 'This Little Light of Mine' (no kidding), to appreciate a talking blues sermon about the hellfire horrors of abortion. Lord willing, our hero can break this wild mare: Call him the Ho Whisperer."
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