My Favorite Movies

The blues is two things--raw sex and hardline spirituality. The lyrics can be raunchy, sweaty passionate pleas, and turn on a dime into fervent prayer and God-fearing morality. Writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) has created a blues movie that doesn't just showcase blues music, but captures the essence of blues in Black Snake Moan--a tale that is equal parts spiritual hymn and down-and-dirty lustful energy.

Christina Ricci is white-trash sex-addict Rae, whose nervous husband (Justin Timberlake!) is away in the Army, while Rae spreads her...love...around town. Samuel L. Jackson is local farmer and one-time blues guitartist Lazarus, struggling to find meaning in his life after his wife leaves him for his best friend. Rae is left for dead on a country road after a particularly violent sexual indiscretion, only to be discovered by Lazarus. Lazarus does what I think any of us would do in this situation. He ties her to a radiator with almost fifty pounds of steel chain to cure her of her sexual demons.

It's a gleefully unusual love story, and the best role Samuel L. Jackson has taken since Pulp Fiction, hands down. Providing the film with one-third of its mighty heart is Jackson's Lazarus, a troubled man with good intentions and a fairly insane idea on how to help someone with a problem. The second piece is Ricci's character--a skinny, bug-eyed skank who would sooner take her shirt off than talk about anything of any meaning until her sympathetic breakdown as Lazarus's prisoner. The third piece of the film's heart is in the soundtrack. Gritty, greasy blues--old standards and new favorites--that reinforce the film's sly way of working in the longings, both religious and sexual, that make the blues so powerful. Jackson's show-stopping rendition of the song "Black Snake Moan" is the film's centerpiece and an Oscar shoo-in for Best Original Song if there ever was one.

The film loses a bit of steam when Timberlake's character figures back into the plot, opting for an ending that's lighter than expected--certainly lighter than a blues song's ending. Brewer was at the screening I attended and announced this as the second chapter in a "Memphis Music Trilogy" that started with Hustle & Flow and will continue with his next film, a country music drama. I'm certainly impressed enough to check out Hustle & Flow, a film I had dismissed as a standard rags-to-riches ghetto story. If it's anything as unexpected, unpredicatble, or entertaining as Black Snake Moan, then I'm in for a treat.