Country Grammar

The Dirty South has served as the background for a host of films dealing with race and class, though nailing the precise flavor of the region and its people isn’t just a case of whistling Dixie. Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, however, feels like the real deal — it hails from the home of backwater Bible thumpers, sweaty juke joints and second-generation sharecropper shacks, and the Memphis-based filmmaker has a knack for capturing the rhythms and vernacular in a way that’s dynamically authentic. Brewer’s Hustle & Flow captured the crunk state of mind that characterizes below-the-Mason-Dixon DIY hip-hop. His latest melodrama switches musical gears and heads into Fat Possum blues territory, hungover with a hellhound on its trail, but still full of fuck-you defiance. And you think it’s hard out there for a pimp? Try being a nympho white chick under the spell of a sickness.

The girl (Christina Ricci) can’t help it, especially once her soldier boyfriend (Justin Timberlake, and he’s not bad) is shipped off and she’s left to fend for herself. Our heroine-in-heat goes trolling for men at a townie party and ends up drugged, beaten and left for dead on a dirt road. Lucky for her, she happens to land in front of the house of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson, clearly drawn to scripts with snakes in the title), a former blues guitarist down on his luck and in desperate need of a lost cause. Full of biblical fervor and pent-up rage, he decides to help the young woman exorcise her unladylike demons by any means necessary… which, loosely translated, means chaining her to a radiator in his living room. Think My Fair Lady for the OxyContin set.

Brewer is no stranger to controversy — he already fashioned a professional purveyor of prostitutes into a folk hero — and there’s the feeling that he’s purposefully baiting folks by walking the line between sociological exploration and misogynistic exploitation. Giving hookers golden hearts is one thing, but why exactly is Ricci spending half the film parading around in little more than soiled panties? And what’s up with the inevitable honky-tonk musical number, which plays like a slo-mo version of every 1950s parent’s worst nightmare?

Like Hustle’s Horatio Alger story hidden under a gruff exterior, Black Snake Moan’s narrative is essentially an after-school special buffered by twelve-bar shuffles. But the call and response of the performers help smooth out the stock and less savory elements, and Ricci’s sinful ferocity acts as a good alkaline for Jackson’s acidic fire-and-brimstone savior. (The actor’s grey tufts offsetting male pattern-baldness should tell the producers of the inevitable Sanford and Son movie they’ve found their lead.) And the movie’s faults feel more like the product of a greenhorn filmmaker still finding his voice than a redneck peckerwood spewing bile. Brewer is kicking a hornet’s nest of taboos in the hope that audiences will look past the film’s borderline offensive elements and deal with some ugly social legacies — stigmatized sexual behavior, still-simmering miscegenation fears, the idea that class trash never rises beyond the heap. He comes close to pulling it off, and you get the feeling that with a few more films under his belt, he’ll be able to drop the daytime-TV sensationalism and just rely on his storytelling chops. Less hustle, better flow.

Meanwhile, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy big-ups the Pacific Northwest, substituting muted grace notes and earth tones for Southern sound and fury. Married thirtysomething Mark (Daniel London) now forgoes pot hazes for Pottery Barn trips; his buddy Kurt (Will Oldham) is still stuck in a rut of perpetual couch-surfing. Kurt wants to check out a hot spring located deep in the woods and convinces his old pal to join him — even though they have nothing in common anymore, they still can’t quit each other. Reichardt’s lo-fi mood piece may be the best film ever made about disintegrating male friendships, and Oldham, a prolific musician who records under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy, nails the sad hippie-dippy stereotype so well that you want to break all his Incredible String Band CDs and give him a hug at the same time.

Don’t even bother trying to find the terrain of Michel Gondry’s new film, The Science of Sleep, on any map. Gael Garcia Bernal tries to woo his dream girl (Charlotte Gainsbourg) via, well, his dreams; cue oddball excursions into a TV show located in the hero’s subconscious, a pony made of yarn running next to a cellophane river and an encore of the oversize hands from Gondry’s “Everlong” video for the Foo Fighters. Like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse directed by Salvador Dalí, the movie — a far cry from his almost-commercial Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — pinballs from surreal vignettes to sugary immaturity in a blink, but it never stops blowing your mind.