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THE ART OF THE FUGUE

The common misconception in salvation is that one must be saved by a force that is stronger by lengths or flawless in character or closer to this thing we call God. Outside of parable, the disparity between savior and saved is a short bridge to cross. Despite salvation's forms (music, co-dependence, addiction, godfearing belief, godless detachment) either end can be inherently flawed, weak, desperate or impoverished in equal measure. Black Snake Moan presents the earthly perspective that the weak, angry and marginalized can and do save each other. And it doesn't always take the form of stained glass or tent revivals or proselytization.

In small towns the country over, particularly in the South, stereotypes of individuals and groups and the relations between them exist. The young, wicked, abused Rae (Christina Ricci) is a white girl in the rural South, leading a cluttered, mere existence: heart, home and soul. She depends on the will of men, booze and drugs to detach her from it. Barely tethered to sanity and led by spells of nymphomania, she comes completely unleashed when Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), a co-dependent piece of her jig-sawed life, ships off to boot camp.

After a night of vice and indiscretion, she winds up beaten and unconscious on a gravel country road, where Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) finds her come the morning after his own night of indulgence. Former blues man Lazarus, mired in and bereft by his own recent soul-oriented beat down after his ex-wife leaves him for his brother, carries her into his farmhouse to heal her wounds. Witnessing what he deems Rae's possession by the Devil (a wonderful echo of his last conversation with his ex-wife), he takes on the chore of not only healing her cut and bruised face and diminishing her fever, but resuscitating her impoverished soul. In his frightened and godfearing way, he decides the only way to keep her from more self-inflicted harm is to chain her to his radiator. What has long been a symbol of punishment, torture and captivity, particularly in the South and particularly to Southern blacks as descendants of slaves, becomes an inverted tribute to the path to freedom. Thus begins the long, dark road to salvation paved with good intentions, violation, blues music and a chance at soulfulness somewhere near the end.

The music frames the story and Gothic images profoundly. Shaped with the blues, tinged with gospel and a bit of "narration" from Son House, director Craig Brewer has given

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