Crazy in Alabama Review
by "Stephen Graham Jones" (stephen AT cinemuck DOT com)October 26th, 1999
Crazy in Alabama: unbewitched
Crazy in Alabama is an 'I learned a lot of secrets that summer' movie, in-line with Stand by Me and all the Stand by Me pretenders. Which is to say it's retrospective, nostalgic, voiced-over, all that. And, as it's set in the summer of 1965, any ritual growing up that's done is of course a growing up into 'America,' a harsh realization of what 'America' means. Setting the movie in Alabama is simply economical, as it allows easier access to all the racial turmoil which defined America in the 1960s. It also gives Lucas Black--Peejoe in the movie--license to get thick and heavy with Southern dialect, which he does as well as anybody and better than most.
It opens as any ritual growing-up movie has to: with him being a kid, in the country, still clinging to his illusions, etc, all of which has to change almost immediately. It does. Enter his Aunt Lucille (Melanie Griffith), on the run from murder charges, telling him the 'secrets' of the murder she's committed. Which is to say that instead of treating him like a kid, she's functioning as the catalyst to his coming of age cycle here. Up to this point--and if you can ignore the oddly dissonant, comical credit sequence up front--Crazy in Alabama is a coherent movie, but as soon as Lucille confesses to Peejoe, it quickly falls apart, or, perhaps tries to thematize the racial division of the times via dividing itself into two movies.
The first movie is pretty much a solo Thelma and Louise: Lucille, trekking across the country to be a starlet in Hollywood, her list of charges growing longer with every stop. Granted, Crazy in Alabama does add a talking head (the husband she murdered) to the mix, and does have Lucille pull off in Vegas what Woody and Demi couldn't in Indecent Proposal, but still, it's all about a woman doing away with paternalistic social constraints and cutting loose for awhile. Period.
The second movie is a little better, as it contains the character who's supposed to 'develop' here, Peejoe, something of a mix between Huck Finn and Forrest Gump. Which is to say he's naive enough that all this racism he finds himself thrust in the middle of simply doesn't make sense. Sum: he sees too well. Result: he loses an eye. Simple stuff. And of course there's Meat Loaf as racist Sheriff Doggett (see the Sheriff in the 1990 Night of the Living Dead for the same character), Peejoe's mortal enemy. And of course Crazy in Alabama does make a meager effort to causally tie Lucille's story together with Peejoe's, but it's so heavy-handed and predictable that it winds up being a bit more anticlimactic than is really needed at the moment.
Crazy in Alabama does have its moments though, like when Taylor Jackson dies, how in the unfocused background there's a bird flying up. Or Lucille's whole Cinderella-in-Hollywood trip, where everything matters because we know when that clock strikes twelve, she's got to cash it all in. Too, the whole thing is almost salvaged by one supporting character--Judge Mead (Rod Steiger)--easily the best performance in the movie, even if he is caught in a courtroom which exists wherever To Kill a Mockingbird and Time to Kill intersect. But he is just one character, and there's really too much wrong in Crazy in Alabama for him to compensate for. As a movie about growing up in the racial turmoil of the 1960s, it might have succeeded--there's some good material there--but as is, there's another movie edited in, and it's difficult to tell which is supposed to be primary.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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