a little allegory

Rating: 6/10 (22 February 2007)

This movie had a notion to be something gritty and provocative, but with all its dirty talk and soft-core sex, ends up being some kind of white-trash fairy tale where the fairy godmother is a black semi-legendary bluesman who's having his own crisis of faith. If you don't automatically flash to Robert Johnson down at the crossroads, there are some clips of Son House talking about the real meaning of the blues. Stereotypes abound in "Black Snake Moan" which isn't a bad thing when you're trying to create an allegory for race relations down in the delta and how much nobler rural southern blacks are than their ignorant immoral white counterparts. Having grown up (white) in the south in the 50s and 60s, I know there's quite a bit of truth in that.
Christina Ricci is pretty good in this symbolic role, plenty ignorant and even more immoral, a nymphomaniac who of course was a victim of incestuous abuse as a child. Sam Jackson is engaging as a soul-searching honest truck farmer who hung up his Gibson a few years before to marry and have a family, which didn't work out the way he'd hoped. The extreme sex, drugs, and violence in the girl's life foreshadow a dark tale, but the story quickly devolves into a "black" comedy with a tidy Hollywood ending.
A little more realism would have helped. For instance, when "Rae" takes four vicious punches to the face, she should have looked a whole lot more swollen instead of her petite features smeared with some fake dried blood, and 2 days later it's barely noticeable. If she had done an elephant-man number for the middle of the movie, imagine, she probably would be front-runner for an Oscar next year. (Think Charlize.) She still may be, if only for the way she acts circles around Justin Timberlake, who is not quite bad, and keeps up pretty admirably with Sam Jackson.