One could get very cynical about Spanish-American heart-throb Antonio Banderas casting his own wife, Melanie Griffith, in the lead role of his first directorial outing, Crazy in Alabama. But at least he had the good sense to cast her in a role that she’s more or less created through sheer force of her own persona. Like her or loathe her, no living actress can do the wide-eyed girly cocktease with the knowing angle of a mature woman quite like her. And for those who don’t think it was her acting talent that got her places, there is still an excellent yarn.
To start with, it would seem Banderas learnt how to choreograph a title sequence from the man who put him on the map, Spanish master Pedro Almodovar, and in a Deep South and Sixties context it works a treat. But any movie that starts with These Boots Were Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra and such a sequence had better deliver the goods, and smartly. Well, for this critic’s negligible bucks Banderas scores an A and misses the + for dragging it out just a tad too long.
Apart from casting his own wife, he breaks another standard textbook rule about telling a cinematic story, which is to tell two of them. The one concerns our Lucille, who has seven children, has just killed her husband, leaves the kids with Mammy and takes hubby’s decapitated (but nevertheless talking) head along for a ride to that place where dreams are made: Hahlywood. The other concerns an ugly mood of racism back in her hometown, which is run by one of those typical fat-gut sheriffs in khaki, except that he’s played by Meat Loaf. It’s a fascinating casting choice, because in retrospect (and possibly because of the rock persona) he comes across as someone slightly puzzled by his own atrocities. It’s an astute observation.
The only thread that seems to hold these two stories together is Lucille’s nephew (Lucas Black), a disarming young boy called Peejoe with a homespun drawl that could accommodate a drugged horse in a hammock under those ghostly Alabama oaks. He, along with his non-committal brother, gets taken in by their uncle (David Morse), the local undertaker, when Aunty ups and offs to California. And it’s the boy who saw what Lucille’s husband did to her, and what the sheriff did to a young black boy. Morse wonderfully portrays a slow but moral man in contrast to his paranoid and racist wife, played by Cathy Moriarty, who oozes a kind of flabby white Southern sexuality in the frustration department.
Apart from a cast of well-observed but always wacky characters – wait for a deeply eccentric Rod Steiger as the judge at the end – there are also scenes of great cinematic beauty. The response to what happened to the black boy for being uppity about swimming in the local pool is one of the most haunting (and locally resonating) scenes on film in a long time.
The sad thing about a film like Crazy in Alabama is that none of our local producers can inspire any of our writers – for that is the way it should be, not vice versa – to create so many fascinating people and make so many pertinent and unlaboured points about racial and/or domestic oppression in such an intelligent, entertaining and ultimately liberating way. Ole!