Product: Crazy in Alabama [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Good performances can't save choppy film
The DVD included an interview with director Antonio Banderas. I mention this because he introduced some of the movie's out takes. In doing so, he said that the original rough cut ran three and a half hours and that cutting it to its present length was very difficult. I am of the 'shorter is better' film school, but, in this case, I would be curious to see the long version. I suspect that Carzy in Alabama's heart wound up on the cutting room floor.In the movie, as in the book, thirteen-year old Peejoe [Lucas Black] narrates two stories. These are two life-altering events that happened to him in his hometown of Industry, Alabama in 1965. One is about about how his Aunt Lucille [Melanie Griffith] kills her abusive husband with rat posioning, parks her seven kids with her mother and drives to California to be a star. The other concerns his witnessing the killing of a young black boy by the local sheriff during a sit-in at a local public swimming pool. Both stories are about the high price of freedom.Carzy in Alabama is very professionally done. It's equal parts sweet and bitter-sweet. The bad thing is that it also has very little substance. Imagine that you are driving down a long, tree-lined driveway. You arrive at a large, beautiful house. You are impressed by your surroundings. You enter the house, which is beautifully decorated, except for one glaring detail - there are no furnishings. You find there are not even any clothes in the closets. That's what movies such as Crazy in Alabama are like. Impressive looking yet sadly empty.This hollowness is not the fault of the actors. What we see of them is quite good. I suspect that the only way to really judge their performance would be to see the rest of the footage. There is a scene during Lucille's trial where she points at a woman in the gallery. She says that she knew all along that this woman, her best friend, had been having an affair with her now dead husband. As if to prove the point, the woman flees the court room in tears. The problem with this scene is that it's the first and last time the audience sees Lucille's best friend. So, the moment lacks impact. I can't blame Banderas. In fact, he seems to have had little problem in directing the cast or in supervising the photography. I can't point the finger at the book's author, because I haven't read it. There is only one place I can lay the blame. The movie's distributor was afraid to release a three-hour version of a film that wasn't very commercial to begin with. [You can tell when a studio has a problem picture when the trailers have virtually nothing to do with the storyline.] I believe that, if you know you are going to lose your investment, why does it matter how long the product runs? Isn't getting praise from a limited audience some kind of consolation?Because it is so badly edited, Crazy in Alabama is unable to tell either of its two stories well. You don't get enough background to relate to Lucille's insisting she had no other option than to kill her husband. She comes across as self-centered, which surely was not the movie's intent. The civil rights story has the picture's most moving and dramatically interesting moments, but this tale gets quitely put in a corner about three-fourths of the way through.