THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION TAKING A CONTROVERSIAL PATH, 'MOAN' HEADS FOR THE HEART.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Writer

It doesn't come out for another week. But we figured you'd better start preparing yourself for "Black Snake Moan" now.

You may have seen the posters for the movie. A stern-looking (or is it demented?) Samuel L. Jackson looms over a barely dressed, dirty blonde and chained-up Christina Ricci. The image recalls lascivious 1950s paperback covers of books that promised illicit sex, often in the steamy, backwoods South -- where "Moan," though contemporary, also happens to be set.

And then there are the charged racial implications of the film's title to its premise. The former is actually taken from an old blues song Blind Lemon Jefferson wrote about losing his sight. The latter involves Jackson's just-divorced, reformed bluesman Lazarus finding the beaten, abused Rae (Ricci) near his farmhouse and nursing her back to health -- but also keeping her chained to his radiator while he tries to "cure" her of raging nymphomania.

But we know what you think is really going on.

Still, while "Moan" gleefully pushes all the hot buttons it can get its grubby little fingers on, it fundamentally is a story of self-improvement and redemption. The question is, will audiences be too turned off, or turned on, to get that?

"Art should make you nervous," Jackson says confidently. "Art should make you think, art should make you talk. It is a lurid story, when you get right down to it. It just so happens to have a redemptive element in the back of it."

Then he adds: "There are all kinds of stories and all kinds of ways to tell them. But this is a way to get people to want to come into the theater. It's provocative."

"Moan" is writer-director Craig Brewer's follow-up to his break-out indie film sensation "Hustle & Flow." That one was about a Memphis pimp whose pursuit of a rap music career made him a better man.

"Moan" shares that theme, as well as a certain improbability and, of course, deep fascination with the underside of human nature.

"In the South, we're attracted to the grotesque and outrageous, I think," Tennessee-based Brewer says. "Sometimes, it's in our own families. So it's hard not to have a true, sincere love and affection for some rather extreme characters. So there is a certain outrageousness and pulpy nature to the movie. But I've found that the best way to experience this is to see people playing it straight with a tremendous amount of heart."

Somehow, the image of Ricci bound to a radiator doesn't exactly shout heart. Or straight, for that matter.

"This is not necessarily a realistic portrayal of the days and lives of Southerners," Brewer wryly admits. "I assure you, we do not chain our women ... not to my knowledge, anyway."

That said, the script pulls no punches in depicting Rae's degrading, precaptivity promiscuity or Lazarus' borderline crazy anger. When Brewer, hot off "Hustle & Flow's" Sundance Film Festival and, later, Oscar success (yes, it's where the shock-award-winning song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" came from), was being courted by every studio in Hollywood, his insistence on making "Moan" next was met with dismay. Only Paramount, which released "Hustle," agreed to let him make the movie (which is going out through the studio's Paramount Vantage art film arm) exactly as he wanted to.

"Moan" is also backed by the "Hustle" producing team of John Singleton and Stephanie Allain. They agree with Jackson's assessment that teasing something transgressive will probably sell more tickets than promoting the story of two damaged people helping one another overcome their demons.

Still, there's that bondage business ...

"As wild and as shocking as it is, I think (the promotional materials) let you know that you can laugh and have fun with this, that you don't have to take it literally," Allain observes.

"But the studio didn't shy away from what it was," adds Singleton, an often provocative director ("Boyz N the Hood," "Rosewood," "Baby Boy") himself.

"We discussed hiding the chain," Allain admits, chuckling. "But we couldn't cut together a trailer, so they just decided to put the chain at the forefront and let people deal with it up front."

For her part, Ricci refutes any suggestions that the movie is exploitive or misogynistic.

"Rae is such an honest depiction of a woman who suffered horrible sexual abuse as a child and -- as what unfortunately so often happens to sexually abused girls -- grows up to be promiscuous, with low self-esteem and self-destructive," the former Wednesday Addams actress explains. "She wasn't a sugar-coated example of this type of woman, and to me that meant that she wasn't judged by the writer."

Ricci does confess, though, that right before production commenced, "I had a moment of going, like, 'Wow, I'm going to be half-naked for the next three months and doing these really intense emotional scenes.' It's a foreboding and scary feeling, but then you kind of hold your nose and jump."

As the other major female presence on the set, Allain understood that "Moan" could certainly give the impression of being sexist.

"I don't disagree with the charges, but I see what Craig is trying to do," she says. "I see that the chain is a metaphor, that the movie is ultimately about two damaged people healing each other by being connected, by being tethered to something that's immovable. If this was ultimately saying that women need to be chained, I wouldn't produce it. But it's not; it has a different outcome."

Of course, the chain also has a whole other symbolic connotation in a movie with a substantial African-American cast, set in a former Confederate state -- and written and directed by a white man.

"Moan" underdramatizes the racial component, although it's blatantly obvious in any number of the film's images. And Jackson, Singleton and Allain, all of whom are African- American, see no problem with that.

"I grew up in the segregated South, which was totally different from the South that Craig knows now," Jackson notes. "But (Brewer's understanding of African-Americans) doesn't surprise me because I've worked with Quentin Tarantino. I didn't know Craig was white until after I saw 'Hustle & Flow,' though. Then I was kind of like, wow.

"But he tells these stories because he is caught up in the music, and the way the music is created."

"I've made a movie about rap and a movie about blues, and it's hard to ignore the African-American experience in the South with those two music genres," Brewer explains. "And as much as I know that making him black and her white is something that is provocative in the film, and it evokes old fears that white society has of black sexuality -- all that b.s. that caused so much damage in the South -- the color of their skin really didn't come into my mind that much in terms of their story getting together.

"So I feel a great amount of safety. Blacks that I know in Memphis know that my heart's in the right place, that I'm not trying to do anything exploitive. But I am trying to be provocative. I am trying to explore things that we in the South are interested in.

"And you know what?" Brewer concludes. "We're interested in each other."

Still, at a time when audiences seem to prefer the sanitized, unambiguous uplift of movies such as "The Pursuit of Happyness," does selling "Black Snake Moan's" more provoking elements truly make sense?

"There are plenty of moral and socially responsible movies out there that tank," Brewer says. "You have to view these rather titillating elements to 'Black Snake Moan' in a world where NC-17 movies can't even come out in theaters, but as soon as something goes to DVD, they cover the boxes with 'Unrated!' and 'Explicit Version!'

"And those sell twice as much as the other copies. So I'm not too concerned about that, actually."

Bob Strauss [phone]

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CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) chain reaction

'Black Snake Moan' filmmakers say image doesn't tell the whole story

(2) no caption ("Black Snake Moan")

(3) Samuel L. Jackson plays a reformed bluesman in "Black Snake Moan," which opens March 2.