Absurd, Southern-Fried Melodrama Never Transcends Its Audacious Premise

Rating: 3/10 (27 August 2007)

It would be too easy to dismiss this strangely unsatisfying 2007 film entirely because I can't tell whether director/writer Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) is trying to satirize the Southern Gothic sensibilities of a Tennessee Williams potboiler or replicate the excesses of an early 1970's blaxploitation movie. Either way, he cannot seem to pull off his audacious premise which involves a cuckolded blues guitarist appropriately named Lazarus who enchains a nymphomaniac to his radiator. If the film was played out as over-the-top as the premise, then it might have had a fighting chance, but as it stands, Brewer is too ensconced in his chicken-fried fable to mine the potential black comedy in this hilariously preposterous exercise.
The hackneyed plot centers on Lazarus, a self-righteous man stinging from his wife's decision to leave him for his younger brother. Meanwhile, a skeletal nymphomaniac, Rae, is so distraught over her boyfriend Ronnie leaving for the army that she goes on a hedonistic meltdown involving alcohol, prescription drugs and indiscriminate sex. A violent episode leaves her unconscious on the road where Lazarus finds her limp body. The rest of the film focuses on how the principals change from the ordeal but not before facing a lot of inner demons along the way. However, unlike Hustle & Flow, I cannot really say that I cared about the fate of these misbegotten characters at the end. Brewer just can't seem to connect the absurdity of the central situation with anything resembling real life, which ironically may be exactly his point here.
The actors try hard to breathe empathetic life into the overripe characters, but they are ultimately defeated by the lurid dimensions of the story. As Lazarus, Samuel L. Jackson almost makes the situation palatable and even sings several blues numbers with surprising conviction, but Christina Ricci makes Rae a primal stockpile of white trash clichés on top of a condescending back story. Justin Timberlake is completely out of his league as Ronnie and neutralizes every scene he's in with his amateur standing as an actor. Look for former child star Kim Richards (Escape to Witch Mountain) as Rae's defeated mother and a doozy of a fight scene between the two in a grocery store. The 2007 DVD has plenty of extras including an enthusiastic commentary track by Brewer and a half-hour making-of documentary, "Conflicted: The Making of Black Snake Moan". There are a couple of shorter featurettes about the music and five deleted scenes.