rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2007-03-27 02:39 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2007-03-27 02:39 am
Black Snake Moan
Ruth and I went out and caught Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan at the Somerville Theatre earlier this evening, in a gigantic decaying Art-Deco old-style movie-house with curtains and about three other people in it and almost no heating.
Wow.
The one-sheets for Black Snake Moan had led me to expect, well, pretty much a seventies-throwback blaxploitation raveup: I mean, Christina Ricci, basically unclothed, is chained to Samuel L. Jackson's leg.
And that's in there, and I don't know how else they could have marketed it, but that was one of the finest pieces of pure cinema I've seen in a very long time, as well as being a movie which raises and confronts things movies don't talk about, and also a serious and genuine exploration of the aesthetic, morals, and ethics associated with the blues.
I think the blues are the key to this film, really, but I'll get more into that in a minute.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Lazarus, a retired musician and current truck-farmer whose wife has just run out on him after twelve years of marriage. She was cheating with his younger brother, and the concern of his pastor and others in his church isn't doing much to help him with it. (They're genuinely concerned! In useful ways! Because sometimes movies take religion seriously! /astonishment) Lazarus finds a mostly-naked, extremely brutalized, unconscious and feverish woman lying in his driveway one morning.
Christina Ricci plays Rae, who ends up unconscious in Lazarus's driveway after going on a serious bender inspired by her boyfriend leaving for the Army. Rae is half-starved, friendless, with a bad reputation and a worse history; her sexuality is the bludgeon with which she faces the world and the ocean in which she drowns her introspection. Neglect of a fever and a brutal beating by her boyfriend's brother leave her delirious and nightmare-ridden.
Lazarus takes her in, tends her, and chains her to the wall because in her fever she wanders mindlessly and hurts herself. When she gets well, he declares he isn't letting her go: God sent her to him, and she's going to stay until he drives the devil out of her.
The clash between the sheer elemental forces of their stubbornnesses and wounds makes the rest of the movie, as they slowly ease towards healing one another. I already knew Samuel L. Jackson was a force of nature, but Ricci gives a performance unlike anything I've ever seen, flamboyant, loving, crazy and lost. Her slow realization that her being chained to him means that he is also chained to her is sheerly gorgeous. He drives her into examining her life; she drives him back to his guitar. Their dynamic dances betweens sexuality (never overtly expressed), the slow growth of family feeling, and other things too complex for either to put into words.
Then her boyfriend comes back, with a dishonorable discharge and a terribly wounded pride.
This is Southern Gothic, of course, with a vengeance. I think that Flannery O'Connor would recognize these people. And the blues run through it all, whether sung in the background, on record players and radios, or by just about any character, or even as narration; the film opens with documentary footage of Son House talking about the blues and where they come from (betrayal, and specifically the betrayal of love). The ethics of the blues are the ethics of the characters. I've read some reviews that claim that Lazarus is a Magical Negro, the convenient archetypal black-guy-going-out-of-his-way-to-help-hapless-white-person, and I can see where they got that idea, but I think that reading is missing several points: firstly and most obviously that he's just as fucked up as she is, but also that Lazarus is a bluesman, and that means that hell yes, he's magical, in the sense of having power. And that power is a two-edged sword. He quit the blues when he joined his church and married his wife, and still when leaving him she spits in his face that he'd better not try to curse her. Blues are the devil's music-- just ask Robert Johnson. Lazarus is motivated entirely selfishly when he starts to work on Rae: if he can keep the devil out of her, maybe he can keep the devil out of him.
It's his art that saves them, though, in a scene that is almost impossibly charged with emotional power: night, thunderstorm, Rae with her demons, Lazarus with his, his guitar, his voice, the electricity flickering. Three minutes or so, maybe, and at the start they are both drowning and afterward they are both safe and free. I can't tell you how this works, the conjunction of actors, writing, music, sound, visual framing, slap of hand on guitar belly, but if you ever want to see human salvation depicted literally in a work of fiction, there it is for you, as he calls up their pasts and shouts them down enough to live through.
I'm not saying this is a perfect movie, though it has more than one perfect scene. For one thing, I've never really approved of the blues' attitude toward women, the essential marry-settle-down-don't-fuck-around sometimes anti-sex conservative morality of it all, and there is some of that here (though less than there might have been). And in general the concept that chaining a woman to your radiator and ordering her around could be the best thing that ever happened to her is troubling. However, as a story about two people and the blues, a meditation on bonds and why people might need them and choose them, and a perfectly observed look at some odd crannies of racial politics (it's perfectly obvious why Lazarus's immediate response to finding Rae is *not* to take her to the hospital), it's extremely impressive. It's decidedly the best performance Christina Ricci has ever given. And it fulfills the primary function of cinema more than admirably, the function of showing images that have never been seen before and drilling them into the heart.
Oh, and in the other minor miracles category? Justin Timberlake, of all people, plays Rae's boyfriend. I didn't recognize him until I saw the name in the credits. And then I went wait, what? Because he was excellent. So makes-annoying-boyband-singer-into-respectable-actor-I-have-no-idea-how can also go on this movie's credit sheet.
If I see a better film this year, I'll be very, very surprised indeed.
Wow.
The one-sheets for Black Snake Moan had led me to expect, well, pretty much a seventies-throwback blaxploitation raveup: I mean, Christina Ricci, basically unclothed, is chained to Samuel L. Jackson's leg.
And that's in there, and I don't know how else they could have marketed it, but that was one of the finest pieces of pure cinema I've seen in a very long time, as well as being a movie which raises and confronts things movies don't talk about, and also a serious and genuine exploration of the aesthetic, morals, and ethics associated with the blues.
I think the blues are the key to this film, really, but I'll get more into that in a minute.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Lazarus, a retired musician and current truck-farmer whose wife has just run out on him after twelve years of marriage. She was cheating with his younger brother, and the concern of his pastor and others in his church isn't doing much to help him with it. (They're genuinely concerned! In useful ways! Because sometimes movies take religion seriously! /astonishment) Lazarus finds a mostly-naked, extremely brutalized, unconscious and feverish woman lying in his driveway one morning.
Christina Ricci plays Rae, who ends up unconscious in Lazarus's driveway after going on a serious bender inspired by her boyfriend leaving for the Army. Rae is half-starved, friendless, with a bad reputation and a worse history; her sexuality is the bludgeon with which she faces the world and the ocean in which she drowns her introspection. Neglect of a fever and a brutal beating by her boyfriend's brother leave her delirious and nightmare-ridden.
Lazarus takes her in, tends her, and chains her to the wall because in her fever she wanders mindlessly and hurts herself. When she gets well, he declares he isn't letting her go: God sent her to him, and she's going to stay until he drives the devil out of her.
The clash between the sheer elemental forces of their stubbornnesses and wounds makes the rest of the movie, as they slowly ease towards healing one another. I already knew Samuel L. Jackson was a force of nature, but Ricci gives a performance unlike anything I've ever seen, flamboyant, loving, crazy and lost. Her slow realization that her being chained to him means that he is also chained to her is sheerly gorgeous. He drives her into examining her life; she drives him back to his guitar. Their dynamic dances betweens sexuality (never overtly expressed), the slow growth of family feeling, and other things too complex for either to put into words.
Then her boyfriend comes back, with a dishonorable discharge and a terribly wounded pride.
This is Southern Gothic, of course, with a vengeance. I think that Flannery O'Connor would recognize these people. And the blues run through it all, whether sung in the background, on record players and radios, or by just about any character, or even as narration; the film opens with documentary footage of Son House talking about the blues and where they come from (betrayal, and specifically the betrayal of love). The ethics of the blues are the ethics of the characters. I've read some reviews that claim that Lazarus is a Magical Negro, the convenient archetypal black-guy-going-out-of-his-way-to-help-hapless-white-person, and I can see where they got that idea, but I think that reading is missing several points: firstly and most obviously that he's just as fucked up as she is, but also that Lazarus is a bluesman, and that means that hell yes, he's magical, in the sense of having power. And that power is a two-edged sword. He quit the blues when he joined his church and married his wife, and still when leaving him she spits in his face that he'd better not try to curse her. Blues are the devil's music-- just ask Robert Johnson. Lazarus is motivated entirely selfishly when he starts to work on Rae: if he can keep the devil out of her, maybe he can keep the devil out of him.
It's his art that saves them, though, in a scene that is almost impossibly charged with emotional power: night, thunderstorm, Rae with her demons, Lazarus with his, his guitar, his voice, the electricity flickering. Three minutes or so, maybe, and at the start they are both drowning and afterward they are both safe and free. I can't tell you how this works, the conjunction of actors, writing, music, sound, visual framing, slap of hand on guitar belly, but if you ever want to see human salvation depicted literally in a work of fiction, there it is for you, as he calls up their pasts and shouts them down enough to live through.
I'm not saying this is a perfect movie, though it has more than one perfect scene. For one thing, I've never really approved of the blues' attitude toward women, the essential marry-settle-down-don't-fuck-around sometimes anti-sex conservative morality of it all, and there is some of that here (though less than there might have been). And in general the concept that chaining a woman to your radiator and ordering her around could be the best thing that ever happened to her is troubling. However, as a story about two people and the blues, a meditation on bonds and why people might need them and choose them, and a perfectly observed look at some odd crannies of racial politics (it's perfectly obvious why Lazarus's immediate response to finding Rae is *not* to take her to the hospital), it's extremely impressive. It's decidedly the best performance Christina Ricci has ever given. And it fulfills the primary function of cinema more than admirably, the function of showing images that have never been seen before and drilling them into the heart.
Oh, and in the other minor miracles category? Justin Timberlake, of all people, plays Rae's boyfriend. I didn't recognize him until I saw the name in the credits. And then I went wait, what? Because he was excellent. So makes-annoying-boyband-singer-into-respectable-actor-I-have-no-idea-how can also go on this movie's credit sheet.
If I see a better film this year, I'll be very, very surprised indeed.