Writer-director Craig Brewer’s last film Hustle & Flow (2005) garnered a great deal of attention, even scoring some awards for a film that is a combo of Blaxploitation and an up-from-the-gutter music biopic. It’s hard for me to tell if he is subverting stereotypes or if they’re subverting him. (H&F was previously discussed on this blog.)
My pal Dan Dorman says he’s the new Michael Schultz, the director of Cooley High (1975), Car Wash (1976) and Which Way Is Up? (1977).
Maybe.
I saw Brewer’s latest, Black Snake Moan, on its opening night. I went to go see it at the blackest theater I had the balls to attend, so it was off to Beltway Plaza in P.G. County. It’s a downscale mall catering largely to an African American customer base.
If you’ve seen the poster or the trailer, you can sense that Brewer is pushing some pretty big buttons with his approach, tapping into a lot of American fears about powerful black men and their lust for white women. In crudest terms, it’s a movie about a black man who decides to cure a young slutty woman of her wickedness by chaining her up.
SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to discuss some points about the ending.
I actually found this to be a more interesting movie than Hustle & Flow. Don’t let that chain throw you off. It doesn’t show up for 40 minutes and it comes off 36 minutes later. The movie is really about the relationship between two really damaged people, Rae (Christina Ricci) and her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake). It’s made clear that she takes drugs and has promiscuous sex because she was abused as a child. Her boyfriend knows this and accepts that she has motivations for her bad behavior. In the end, the two work out their issues sufficiently to at least attempt to build a life together.
I don’t want to over read this, but the chain isn’t a literal chain at all. Rae fights the chain, but then embraces it. There’s a scene where she can’t sleep until she wraps the chain around herself to calm down. When she was free to do whatever she wanted, she acted out in self-destructive ways. It’s only when she is physically confined that she is able to move beyond hurting herself. She and Ronnie get married and a small gold chain is fastened around her waist. At first, this seems like a joke. Then, you see the two of them drive and things get tough. Rae starts to get the fever again; you can see she’d love to bolt out of that car and run off. But then she wraps the chain around her hand and she is able to pull it together and comfort her new husband.
Boundless liberation can be a prison of its own.
Am I over analyzing? Probably. This profile of Brewer in WaPo I feel backs me up:
…”Black Snake Moan” remains deeply personal. Once he began writing, he says, he realized the story was about faith, God, community and “my mind, and how easy it was to lose control of myself, and how I needed to be chained to something, I needed to be held to home, somehow.”
Are you really going to go see some pulpy gothic flick about a black guy chaining up a half-naked white chick for her own good? If you even have to think about it, the answer is probably no. I just wanted to let you know what you’re missing.
Tags: Craig Brewer, Black Snake Moan, Hustle & Flow