Black Snake Moan
Craig Brewer, USA, 2007
Rating: 3.6

Craig Brewer’s first movie, 2005’s Hustle & Flow, wasn’t so much a film about rap music as it was an exploration of the urge that pushes us to escape the dreariness of the everyday and strive for something better. Brewer’s follow-up, Black Snake Moan, is much more “about” a form of music (the blues, in this case) than its predecessor, but at the end of the day it’s also more concerned with urges — albeit of an entirely different sort. Namely, those that drive Rae, a barely dressed bundle of self-esteem issues played by Cristina Ricci, to hump every man she sees whenever her anxiety-plagued boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) leaves town with his National Guard unit. Rae’s implacable itch is less a jones for the physical sensation of the sexual act as a desperate hunger for what it represents: It’s a way to fill the spiritual void, a means to keep at bay the demons gnawing at her soul.

Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), a former juke-joint blues man turned farmer, is well acquainted with such demons — driven by a similar emptiness, his no-good wife has taken up with his little brother. So when he finds Rae beaten and dumped on the side of the road, he takes her in and tries to nurse her back to health. But her wickedness requires more than medicine; it’s got to be detoxed out of her system. What else is a poor man to do, then, but chain her to his radiator to sweat out the DT’s of sex addiction?

On the surface, this looks like cheap exploitation. And it’s hard to argue too strongly against that view, given the amount of screen time Rae, a beguiling trailer-trash pixie with a washboard tummy and smoothly shaven legs, spends in a cut-off shirt and beckoning white panties. Certainly, it’d be easier to dismiss such perceptions if Moan ever addressed the incendiary potential of its conceit. This is Brewer’s second film in a row to feature black men either figuratively or literally keeping white women in chains — although to be fair, Flow’s DJay pimped black girls, too — and not acknowledge the racial tensions inherent in that relationship. Lazarus does get one throwaway line about not wanting to call the cops because he’s been harassed in the past just for being “black and nearby,” yet it’s hardly enough.

But if this is exploitation, it’s exploitation in the service of a greater good. Or at least it’s meant to be. Lazarus chains up Rae to save her soul, and in the process she’s meant to save his (hey, his name is Lazarus, after all), allowing him the strength to face his own demons and seek salvation in the healing power of the blues. But when Ronnie eventually returns, looking for his woman, everything unravels, and ultimately we’re asked (or forced) to take each character’s redemption more or less on faith.

Black Snake Moan is obviously meant more as a fable than a character study; otherwise we’d see Lazarus in an entirely different light — as a dangerous, crazy old coot — when he drags out that chain. We’re fully aware that the film takes place in its own world: Unlike Hustle & Flow, which was grounded in the gritty streets of Memphis, Moan exists in a storybook South where there are plenty of older black folks to fill up a juke joint but astonishingly few younger ones blaring hip-hop at full volume. So we’re inclined to cut it a little slack, and a raft of strong performances — including rapper David Banner as a local pimp and Michael Raymond-James as Ronnie’s shifty best friend — certainly helps.

Still, we need a little more convincing than we get that Lazarus has gotten over his divorce enough to enter into a relationship with a sweet, doting pharmacist (played by S. Epatha Merkerson). And we need a lot more convincing that Rae won’t return to her old ways. Having drilled into our brains the curative properties of the blues, Black Snake Moan abruptly rolls to an ambiguous, unsettling conclusion. Instead of a rousing shout of “Hallelujah” or a deep, bone-rattling moan, we leave the theater with a shrug of the shoulders and a perfunctory “Huh.” No one expects a happy ending, but you expect more catharsis, more oomph, from a movie that derives its title, its soundtrack and its metaphorical muscle from such a teeth-gnashing, spirit-lifting genre as the blues.

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