This appalling premise is made only mildly more permissible by the fact that both the chain and the radiator belong to Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson plays Lazarus, a grizzled Southern bluesman who's become understandably unhinged after seeing his wife run off with his younger brother. Lazarus' marital concerns are soon forgotten, however, when he happens upon Rae (Ricci), a half-naked hussie lying unconscious in the middle of the road. Being a good Christian, Lazarus takes Rae into his home and nurses her back to health. Upon making some inquiries, however, he learns that Rae has a reputation of being what Austin Powers might tactfully call "the town bicycle." After thoughtful consideration, Lazarus draws the reasonable conclusion that God has chosen him to cure Rae of her promiscuous ways. So he chains her to his radiator, opens up his Bible, and the rest is history.
Once the key is turned in the shackles, "Black Snake Moan" becomes a weird psychosexual power play between Lazarus and Rae. Lazarus desperately tries to put the fear of God into his captive, while all Rae can think about is jumping his bones. She tries to have sex with Lazarus not as a means of escape (a logical reason) or even because he's played by Samuel L. Jackson (even more understandable) but simply because he's there. Rae, we learn, suffers from acute nymphomania, which causes her to tear off her clothes and leap on top of anyone who can't get away in time. Director Craig Brewer tastefully depicts this condition by ordering a scantily-clad Ricci to squirm around the floor moaning and caressing herself for most of the film.
With his co-star busy working herself up into a fleshy frenzy, Samuel L. Jackson makes the understandable decision to sit back, relax and enjoy the show. As an actor, Jackson has cornered the market on stentorian imperatives; here he gets a few of his trademark one-liners ("Get yo' ass back in my HOUSE!") but spends more time nurturing Lazarus into a well-meaning, if slightly cracked individual full of heartache and pain. It's a great performance, one hopelessly abused by the film it occupies. Endeavoring to construct a two-hour narrative out of a two-minute sex fantasy, Brewer pads his screenplay by interjecting frequent blues ballads performed by Jackson. Before long I learned to cover my ears each time Lazarus reached for a guitar -- Jackson's a fine actor, but B. B. King he ain't.
After all, why have Jackson sing when you've got a former member of *NSYNC in the cast? I can't imagine what was going through the mind of the casting director who read the "Black Snake Moan" screenplay and immediately thought "Justin Timberlake!" but there he is, phoning in the role of Rae's musclebound boyfriend Ronnie. I was hopeful that I'd seen the last of Timberlake when Ronnie shipped out to the army at the beginning of the film, but alas he returns in the third act to rescue Rae from Lazarus and the radiator. Watching the angel-faced Timberlake trip over curse words and furrow his brow in a desperate effort to seem macho, I longed for Samuel L. Jackson to beat the crap out of him. Instead, Lazarus talks Ronnie down, offers him a seat, and calls up a local preacher to act as relationship counselor. And this from a movie that professes to be fun.
I know it seems cruel to point out the narrative illogic of a film whose title is "Black Snake Moan," but indulge me for a moment. After having seen almost every inch of Christina Ricci's body in this movie, I estimate her weight to be in the neighborhood of 95 pounds, very little of which is contained in her hips. Why doesn't she simply slip out of that chain around her waist and walk out the front door? For that matter, what's a blues musician like Lazarus doing with a 50-foot length of chain in his tool shed anyway? And how many divorces react to the loss of a spouse by kidnapping and imprisoning a local youth?
Even more troubling than the film's logical inconsistencies is its cheerful ideological depravity. When all is said and done, "Black Snake Moan" is a comedy that delights in the imprisonment and abuse of a sexually objectified female. This, of course, makes it ripe territory for the gleeful Craig Brewer, whose last movie "Hustle and Flow" was the story of a Memphis pimp-turned-rapper who climbed to the top on the backs of his three bubble-headed harlots. "Hustle and Flow" was a big hit, but some critics pondered what they thought might be misogynistic undertones in the film's subtext. I wonder what those critics will make of "Black Snake Moan."
Now, being a human male, I can certainly understand a filmmaker's motivation for taking off Christina Ricci's clothes and telling her to roll around the floor. But if Brewer's goal was to create an unabashed sleaze-fest, did he have to go out of his way to underline the film's seediness? Toward the end of "Black Snake Moan," we learn that Rae's nymphomania is derived from the sexual abuse at the hand of her father as a small child. Now what the hell did the film have to go and do that for? For a movie whose premise teeters precariously on the verge of being a comic depiction of sexual abuse, the inclusion of an incest subplot is just poor form. What little novelty we might derive from Ricci's sex-crazed vixen dries up pretty quickly once we learn that her horniness is a response to childhood rape.
Ultimately, "Black Snake Moan" is sunk not by its preposterousness or its decadence or even by Justin Timberlake, but by its foolish delusions of grandeur. Too timid to fully embrace the sleazy delight of his premise, Brewer tries to justify his trashiness by endowing the film with lots of Important Themes such as love, loneliness, spirituality and so forth. But the movie's threadbare construction -- a babe, a chain, a radiator and not much else -- can't support the weight of these dramatic pretensions, and the whole enterprise collapses under the strain into a heap of over-moralized smut. If Brewer hadn't insisted on getting all serious on us, "Black Snake Moan" might have been pretty badass. Instead, it's just bad.
