Brewer understands the Blues

Rating: 9/10 (11 March 2007)

Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you really should lock up the kids, throw some beer in the pickup and try like hell to find a theater...no, a drive-in showing "Black Snake Moan," the second feature from the neo-Memphian who gave us "Hustle and Flow." What other movie in recent history takes outrageous clichés from 70's exploitation films and inverts them to produce a movie about redemption? What other movie can boast a good-hearted black man having everyday conversations with fellow-businessmen, a potential girl-friend or his preacher while the whole audience is chuckling to themselves "yeah, except he's got a half-naked white chick chained up in his living room!!!" What other movie has a scene played like a classic horror movie scene  "Kid, whatever you do DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR!"  except what is behind the door is a very different kind of terror.
But seriously, even with the over-the-top aspects of the movie (really not so "over"  twenty minutes into it I was thinking "Gee, I used to live next door to that girl in Memphis"), this is really a movie about people who are about as real as can be: good-hearted, wanting to fix life's problems and above all, looking for love even as they are hurting, conflicted and offhandedly profane. Watching this immediately makes you compare it to other depictions of "Southern Culture" (Dukes of Hazzard anyone?) and the comparison is like eating shredded pork from a can all your life, then discovering the slow-cooked contents of a blackened smoker under the stars of a warm Memphis night.
The critics are all over the map on this one, and it seems like the more seriously one takes (or believes Craig Brewer takes) the surface trappings of the movie's genre, the less one likes it, while the more you see something both playful and deeper going on...well, check out the rather surprising review at HollywoodJesus for Pete's sake. This isn't an exploitation film, no matter what it looks like. What the movie really is about is the conjuring up of the spirit of the Blues, and there is a scene, a figurative raising from the musical dead amid a raging thunderstorm, that may well push you towards the nearest guitar shop as soon as the movie is over.