A rather odd little movie

Rating: 6/10 (20 February 2008)

Here we have the charming Deep South tale of Samuel L. Jackson finding beat-up nymphomaniac Christina Ricci lying unconscious by the side of the road and bringing her home to cure her of all that ails her by chaining her to his radiator. Wait, run that by me again? Yes, it's safe to say you haven't seen many movies like Black Snake Moan. There's a lot of weirdness for sure and the movie certainly does have a number of flaws. But when you put the total package together the movie does seem to work, but by just the slimmest of margins. It's not a great movie, it's not an awful movie. It's OK. You could do a lot worse.
Anyhow, as detailed above, the plot is rather simple. Jackson plays Lazarus, an old blues musician who nowadays makes his living as a vegetable gardener. His wife has just left him and this deeply religious man's faith is being sorely tested. Ricci plays Rae, whose boyfriend has just gone off to war, and now this rather disturbed young woman is looking for sex with pretty much anybody anywhere. After one encounter ends rather poorly (to say the least) she's more or less left for dead on the road leading to Lazarus' house. Lazarus scoops her up, brings her home and...chains her to the radiator? Lazarus is certainly determined to cure Rae of what ails here, both physically and emotionally. His methods? Quite interesting that's for sure. But he's not going to let this woman go until she's cured. Thus the chain. And thus begins one of the strangest relationships you've ever seen in any film.
For material such as this to work the two principal actors are going to have to be very much on top of their games and Jackson and Ricci are up to the task. Their solid performances allow you to buy into the admittedly strange story being presented. This material requires the actors to take some chances and really go for it to sell this story and Jackson and Ricci sell it well enough to make the film passable. The film has some lulls and the story is after all a little bizarre but it works more often than not. You even get a few pleasant surprises as Jackson does a pretty fine job singing some blues tunes. And Justin Timberlake, playing Rae's boyfriend, turns out not to be as completely terrible an actor as you might expect him to be. Well, a backhanded compliment is better than no compliment at all right? All in all it's a film which has its lesser moments but the good marginally outweighs the bad.