Lurching to the rhythm of the Deep South, Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan pairs Samuel L. Jackson, a blues-playing Christian, and Christina Ricci, a girl trying to untangle her tingle. DIANE SPODAREK watches the unlikely partnership unfold.


Black Snake Moan by writer/director Craig Brewer opens and closes with black and white archival footage of Mississippi Delta Blues Man Son House (1902-1988) talking about the blues: how the blues can move you to do anything, even move you to kill. Powerful stuff.

Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci are compelling characters as Lazarus and Rae, an unlikely couple to form a friendship other than a sexual one. Not that Rae doesn’t try, but Lazarus reaches for his bible and tells the Lord that if He dumps this white chick in his path, he will do his best to redeem her of her whoring nymphomaniac ways.

And what whoring ways she has too. Before the credits are over Rae has gotta have it. Her main shag, Ronnie, played by Justin Timberlake, a puking anxiety-ridden jarhead with all his teeth, but no personality, hits the road in his pickup truck heading for the national guard hills looking for a better life. Within seconds, Rae begins her ‘moan’ trying to stop herself from scratching her honey pot. She collapses in heat squirming in the wheat field. Then, before you can say ‘grits’ she picks herself up and heads for man land, hunting for a bonk getting at least three or four, searching for more as she drinks and pops pills ending the night with her face smashed in and dumped on the road from a piece of shit southern trash beer-drinking good old boy driving a – pickup truck.

Then the real story begins. After waking from a night of drinking his home made corn liquor because his younger wife left him for a younger version of himself, his own brother, Lazarus finds Rae half naked on the road not far from his front door. It only takes him seconds to realize he’s got a situation: he’s black; she’s a half-naked white chick; it’s the deep South, Mississippi to be exact, where not a whole lot has changed since they lynched niggers and killed white people (Civil Rights Workers) who like niggers, not that many years ago. Not much has changed in the South from a black man’s point of view. So he does the unthinkable, he tries to help her: he carries her into his home, dumps her on the sofa and chains her to the radiator with a long black chain.

The film is now a threesome: man, woman and chain. The chain is about fifty feet so she can get to the toilet, the kitchen, and outdoors for a bit of sunshine. Why Lazarus doesn’t give her a shirt, is the director’s choice of giving the male gaze what it wants, lots of flesh; but after a while, Ricci’s small white bikini panties and half t-shirt are just distracting from what else is going on in any particular scene.

Although Lazarus and Rae fill the screen with punch, the other characters act as if they are all on Prozac: they possess no mystery, drama or life. Nothing happens without Rae and Lazarus, except towards the end of the film when sensuality oozes from mostly the al- black characters dancing to the blues in a local bar. Ricci is good too, but annoying after awhile with her wide eye moaning about wanting it again and again. In out-of-focus flashbacks we see her nymphomania condition is the result of unspeakable trauma from a man who turns out to be her mother’s boyfriend who carries a Zippo lighter with confederate symbols. Another reference to the Deep South and the usual nice girl just caught up in her demons because of a mother who did not protect her.

This is a story about Lazarus, a blues man who gave it up and let selling tomatoes out of the back of his pick-up truck be the best life has to offer. Then he meets Rae and he takes out the guitar, he has two of them under the bed, and the healing begins. Jackson, who sings in the film, including the title song by Blind Lemon Jefferson, does so with some true emotion, although his guitar playing is carefully edited. No matter. He is one of the most amazing actors on the silver screen, and without him, this film would not have a purpose.

Playing the blues, can Lazarus change Rae? Can he learn to just accept her for who she is? Can the blues heal them both? The blues makes people sad, glad, and long for what can never be. That is the essence of this movie, the longing for what can never be, because the South is full of misery, and this is another Hollywood version of our insatiable desire to see poor white-trash folks getting drunk and puking their lives down the toilet. If it was not for Samuel L. Jackson, we couldn’t care less. He is that good. The soundtrack is amazing, lots of blues songs I had never heard before. The ending is also unbelievably implausible. You could go just about anywhere in this movie after accepting the logic of a black man chaining a white woman to a radiator, anywhere except where it does go: the sweet marriage of the nympho and the jarhead. You know the first time he hears a loud noise he’s going to bolt; and you know, the second he’s gone, she is gonna moan.