My Five Year Plan

Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan has, if not the most bold, then certainly the most happily controversy-courting logline of any recent film: a black bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to cure a white nymphomaniac (Christina Ricci) by chaining her to his radiator. The very thought evokes dozens of layers of racial and sexual problematics – is there another filmmaker in America whose narrative impulses are as vehemently opposed as Brewer? First came Hustle and Flow, which dared (!) to have a pimp as a wannabe-rapper hero, and whose quiet blend of skillfully withdrawn aesthetics and strong performances not only crafts D-jay (Terrence Howard) into a sympathetic human being but into a sort of iconic underdog hero in the vein of Rocky. Never mind that filmmakers have been making heroes out of murderers and sociopaths for years – it was seemingly the very notion of a pimp being made into a hero that raised red flags of anger.

Hustle and Flow is a strong work of cinema, in part because beneath the shabby Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s Put on a Show” story is an intimately carved portrait of a man who refuses others to judge him on anything but his own terms. The putatively ‘sexy’ elements of Hustle and Flow – the rap, the prostitution, the game – all run secondary to the protagonist’s idiosyncratic sense of American self-determination. It’s a remarkably conservative, almost transgressively square moral, and if there’s a disconnect between the come-on and the follow-through, I think Brewer would say the problem is with us.

Black Snake Moan works along these lines as well – it’s a relentlessly, delightfully cornpone film, filled with some of the most unabashed melodrama (unbelievable coincidences, exploratory backstories, dynamic oppositions) placed on the American screen in quite a while. Brewer’s aim here is not simply to explore the intersections of love, sex, race, slavery, miscegenation, violence, the War in Iraq, “red states,” the blues, gospel, and hip hop in the South but to give purpose to the whole shambolic affair by denying the audience what they think they’re going to get. The last third of the film, which goes so far in a direction away from audience expectations that I can’t talk about it with all sorts of spoiler warnings, is not just an enunciation of melodrama’s reconstruction of the domestic unit but a sort of sacramental paean on human connection.

But of course there’s two acts before that, and a lot of difficulty to get through – some characters who seem to exist only as signposts for The Problems of the World (David Banner’s Tehronne in particular), some serving the exact opposite purpose (S. Epatha Merkerson’s Angela, but Merkerson, an incredible actress (Lackawanna Blues!) who almost never gets the chance to show off her skill, elevates her almost comically-named character to a richness not available on the page). But to answer the central question that’s on everyone’s mind: No, I don’t believe the film is racist, though it plays off and earns much of its mileage from the gulf between what’s on screen and the racially-charged expectations of the audience. Whether or not the film is sexist is murkier – there’s an extent to which the parallelism between Rae’s nymphomania and Ronnie’s (Justin Timberlake) anxiety attacks (which both play out as a sort of diseased exhibition of passivity and assert themselves at moments of extreme duress) seems to make some rather unseemly statements about the pathology of sexual performance.

But. More things to like: Amy Vincent’s unobtrusive but warmly sunsoaked lighting, a bravura lead performance from Ricci, who like Howard in Hustle and Flow seems to conjure an incredibly insightful human being buried beneath layers of defensive offensiveness. Someone needs to give a shoutout to the incredible make-up artists who worked on this film - Jackson’s warty face is great, but even better is the hazy shade of pale covering Ricci, giving her the look of ‘After three years’ from those ‘What Meth Will Do To You in Five Years’ posters (the promotional images don’t do justice to how sickly she looks throughout much of this film). I could be wrong about Brewer – with Hustle and Flow I told myself to wait until his next film before I came to any conclusions about the nature of his work, but I think maybe I’ll just have to wait until his next before I determine what exactly the ethical nature of his work is.

I’m certainly looking forward to it.