Snakes and Sam Jackson Together Again

Two years ago, Craig Brewer announced his presence to the cinematic world with Hustle & Flow, a variation of A Star is Born for the rap set. Now, he's back with Black Snake Moan, a film that nobody will confuse with My Fair Lady despite its somewhat similar plotline. As he did in Hustle & Flow, Brewer demonstrates a knack for texturing his incredibly unrealistic story with the details of real life, flavoring his work with just enough tartness to persuade his audience to swallow his delightfully and oddly sweet concoction.

The film stars Samuel L. Jackson, who is almost entirely unrecognizable in terms of both demeanor and appearance. Shaggy-bearded and indifferent to his thinning salt and pepper hair, Jackson's Lazarus practically speaks in a whisper most of the time and only allows the fire boiling under his surface to reveal itself when he is playing his beloved blues. At the start of the film, Lazarus has just been done wrong by a wife of 20 years who ran off with his brother. Bitter and lonely, he sees no outlet for his agony until he finds Rae, played by Christina Ricci, unconscious on the side of the road. In rebuilding this promiscuous young woman who craves sex like cocaine, he reconstructs himself-but you know the rest.

To be fair, Brewer throws in some twists along the way and inspires his audience to care about his characters by coaxing very good work from Jackson and Ricci. He even gets a passable performance from Justin Timberlake, who plays Ricci's army-bound boyfriend, although J.T. does not get any real opportunities to fully display his acting range, whatever that may be. In the cinematic doldrums of early March though, entertainment like this should be appreciated. And, as he did with Hustle & Flow, Brewer manages to elicit the assortment of emotions-doubt in the beginning, anxiety in the middle, happiness in the end, etc.-that should accompany a film of this sort.

At the same time, Black Snake Moan is at its best when displaying the griminess of poverty. For Rae and Lazarus, life is sweaty and dirty, and the cling of filth can't be fully dissipated by a bath. This dingy world is the same one inhabited by the characters of Hustle & Flow, and, in both films, Brewer demonstrates the need to force his highly detailed cinematic vision into the restrictive confines of generic forms. Then again, in the wake of Martin Scorsese's richly deserved best director win for The Departed, which many critics derided as just a gangster film, perhaps it is unwise to chide a director for taking a well-trodden path which he executes admirably, with just enough grit to make the medicine go down.