Off The Chain

[February 28th, 2007] Let's not mince words: Black Snake Moan is a movie about Samuel L. Jackson chaining a half-naked Christina Ricci to his radiator. And director Craig Brewer knows exactly how inflammatory that image is. He's placed the black man, the white girl and the radiator smack-dab in the middle of Tennessee. Tennessee: the state where just last year the Republican Party tried to derail Harold Ford Jr.'s U.S. Senate campaign by producing ads suggesting the mixed-race candidate might have a weak spot for white women. And the ads worked.

But Craig Brewer—like any good ol' boy of Southern myth—he flat-out do not care. If he wants to dress Ricci in Daisy Dukes and a halter top festooned with the Confederate flag, he will. If he wants to film Jackson leading his harnessed captive across his acres like a mule, that's exactly what he's going to do. And if he wants to redeem Ricci from her sinful ways—with slavery, blues songs and a double shot of moonshine—then who the hell are you to lecture him on taste? Brewer makes his mindset perfectly clear in the opening credits, which feature Ricci blocking a tractor and expressing her disinclination to yield by extending the customary digit.

The director is no stranger to controversial subjects. His last movie, 2005's Hustle & Flow, was a Caucasian guy's examination of exactly how hard it is out there for a pimp. That project established the two central themes of Brewer's work: hardscrabble lives in the sweltering South, and the seediest realities of sex. But with Black Snake Moan, he turns up both kinds of heat. Ricci's character, an enticing morsel of trailer trash named Rae, moans for any kind of snake, regardless of color. "She has the itch," one of her liaisons explains. "She just needs cock." And when Lazarus (Jackson, convincingly transformed into an aging farmer) finds Rae beaten unconscious on a dirt road bordering his house, he decides that she needs redemption. Thus the chains, and the radiator. "We shall not be moved," he mutters as he drags his quarry back into the house after another escape attempt.

Does this sound ridiculous? Risible? An unholy mixture of the Bible and '70s rednecksploitation? It is every last one of those things. But it's also tender, and believes fervently in marriage and faith co-existing with the earthiest urges. It has one foot in heaven and the other in hell. In other words, the colors that define Black Snake Moan aren't blacks, whites or browns—the movie is crafted out of the blues. Jackson, summoning his own Chattanooga roots, performs several transfixing guitar numbers, and one of them, set in the middle of a hysterical lightning storm, is in fact the driving force of Rae's salvation. (That her reward is a nervous soldier played by Justin Timberlake doesn't dull the ecstasy.) "The blues," Ralph Ellison wrote, "is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing." What I think he means is that the blues break chains. And so, in his provocative way, does Craig Brewer.