Product: Crazy in Alabama [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Wacky beaten wives and quirky racism!
Ugh, this film is a Hollywood stinker of the worst sort. Director Antonio Banderas throws stylistic flourishes in your face at every turn, but he has no feeling for emotional depth. Two murders occur early on in the film, and there is not a single honest emotional reaction to either of them. Later when Melanie Griffith must seduce an offish police officer in his podunk jail, the two of them just fumble clumsily through the scene, not bothering to make a moment of it believable.Banderas, of course, can only be blamed for about half of the trouble, as the rest is generated by the inept screenplay. There is nothing in the story, for instance, to ever convince you that Griffith's character is a real mother--let alone a mother of *seven* children. Her squalling brood, which she never has to interact with on-screne, seems thrown in simply to make her character more sympathetic. Worst, though, is the story's split personality; it doesn't know if it wants to be a quirky black comedy or a serious drama. It drags in issues of racism and domestic abuse and does no justice by them. Screenwriter Mark Childress, also author of the novel, is as bad as any politician parading "the children" to enliven the latest Washington DC scare-crisis and fill the pork-barrel.