Short Takes
This week in local theaters
BLACK SNAKE MOAN Oh, to have seen Craig Brewer’s Dixie-dynamite melodrama at a backwoods Tennessee drive-in circa 1972—the perfect place to appreciate Brewer’s mash-up of the most loaded racial and sexual imagery he could pack into a frame. You can almost smell the jars of panther piss lighting in the parking lot as a gotta-have-it white girl (Christina Ricci) writhes in lust on a leash of battleship chain, straining at her scanty panties while a wiry black bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) holds the whip hand over her. Racial tension is rarely made an issue in this scorchy Southern milieu: it’s a fact of life, like breathable levels of air pollution.
But as in his previous features The Poor & Hungry and Hustle & Flow, Memphis filmmaker Brewer uses his sharp sense of shock value to knock the audience off guard. His sympathy is for the despised—the chop-shop thug, the pimp, and here, the town slut—and he means to hit you up front with whatever makes them feared or hated to get it out of the way. (Some viewers can’t see past it: most reviews note the Confederate flag on Ricci’s cutoff shirt, but almost none mention the Stars and Stripes right alongside it.) Raw and raunchy for its first half, confoundingly tender and sentimental in its second, Black Snake Moan essentially goofs on its audience’s attraction-repulsion with the hothouse material. The quote-unquote bad girl isn’t really horny, just damaged and despondent, and her captor keeps her chastely chained to his radiator out of tough-love chivalry—to save her from her ruinous impulses.
Maybe this seems like a cop-out, especially after the balls-out tawdriness of the first half. (Ricci, bold as neon, is fearless. Not because she gets naked—she has nothing to fear there—but because her squirmy-nympho role would be a camp hoot if she didn’t burn with a blue flame. Sex here has an explosive horror-movie ferocity, like the Evil Dead turned loose in the woods—this is essentially a werewolf picture.) But Brewer’s commitment to his characters’ redemptive streaks is stubborn and real, as tightly bound to his exploitation-movie chops as Sunday-morning penitence is to Saturday-night mailbox-busting. And with Amelia Vincent’s cinematography catching the dust stomped off Jackson’s floors and the visible wet heat of a sweaty juke joint, the movie has swampy atmosphere to spare. If it turns up at a drive-in, hell, anywhere, go. —Jim Ridley (Starts Friday)
ZODIAC David Fincher’s film version of the Robert Graysmith book about the eponymous San Francisco serial killer may disappoint those expecting a dark, brooding chiller on the order of Fincher’s Se7en. What interests Fincher most is not the hooded madman with the crosshairs logo, but rather the cops and reporters who doggedly pursued him, and who allowed the case to take control of their lives. His Zodiac is a study in obsession made with an obsessive’s eye for detail—specifically, the low-tech aesthetics of American movies from the 1970s. The movie is about the passage of time and the accumulation of massive amounts of information.
It is also exhilarating to behold—the sort of vast, richly involving pop epic that Hollywood by and large seems incapable of making anymore. Like the book, Zodiac hopscotches between the killings themselves, the investigation led by detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and the parallel inquiries made by disheveled San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and rookie cartoonist Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). As the film sprawls into the ’80s and ’90s with the case still unsolved, lives descend into drunken despair, careers are ruined and marriages fall apart. And for the first time since Se7en, Fincher seems more interested in people than in the possibilities of style and of storytelling gamesmanship. The result is a nearly perfect movie about the perils of perfectionism. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday)
EKLAVYA: THE ROYAL GUARD Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s feature plays like vintage Bollywood melodrama, complete with fratricidal murder plots and a glorious final spasm of revenge. The Ranas of Devigarh, an ancient feudal clan of Rajasthani rulers, are a royal family stripped of all but their ceremonial authority in modern-day India, now dealing with an issue of paternity that gnaws at the vitals of the patriarchal system. The story’s central icon and title character is a bodyguard whose ancestors have protected the family for nine generations, a battered human relic of the past played with effortless conviction by aging superstar Amitabh Bachchan.
Although Eklavya was filmed in two actual palaces, the action feels more like an intimate chamber drama, all intense two shots and vehement whispered exchanges. Clocking in at a mere two hours and containing only one song sequence, the movie still embraces the essential imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s Golden Age. This is robust storytelling with blood and thunder pumping through its veins. In Hindi with English subtitles. —David Chute (Shows 3 p.m. March 4 at the Belcourt)
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