CRAZY IN ALABAMA (Columbia) Starring: Melanie Griffith, David Morse, Lucas Black, Meat Loaf Aday, Cathy Moriarty, John Beasley, Richard Schiff, Rod Steiger. Screenplay: Mark Childress, based on his novel. Producers: Meir Teper, Linda Goldstein Knowlton, Debra Hill, Diane Sillan Isaacs. Director: Antonio Banderas. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 112 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I spent much of CRAZY IN ALABAMA trying to figure out the connection between its two largely parallel storylines. I spent much of the rest of the time surprised how little I cared. And I spent the final ten minutes marvelling how quickly a pleasant little film can turn ghastly. Adapted by Mark Childress from his own novel and directed by erstwhile Zorro Antonio Banderas, CRAZY IN ALABAMA takes us back to 1965 in the small town of Industry (accent on the second syllable), Alabama. Our narrator is Peter Joseph "Peejoe" Bullis (Lucas Black), a 13-year-old orphan living with his grandmother. Life is turned upside down when Peejoe's Aunt Lucille (Melanie Griffith) announces to her mother that she has killed and decapitated her abusive husband, and that she's leaving her six children behind while she flees to Hollywood to become a star. Meanwhile, back in Industry, the influx of kids sends Peejoe and his brother Wiley to live with Uncle Dove (David Morse), the segregated town's mortician for whites. Soon Peejoe becomes aware of racial unrest stirring in the town, and becomes an eyewitness to the extreme response of Sheriff John Doggett (Meat Loaf Aday).
I must confess that I kept forgiving CRAZY IN ALABAMA its excess just because it was so unexpectedly weird at times, primarily in the Lucille-on-the-lam segments. Melanie Griffith is an eccentric hoot as Lucille, carrying around her husband's head in a Tupperware container because she wants him around to see her make it as an actress. Her adventures are so ridiculous it's hard not to smile. She seduces a cop and leaves him handcuffed to his own jail cell. She wins $13,000 playing roulette in Las Vegas. She turns the hostess (a splendidly uptight Elizabeth Perkins) at a Hollywood party into a catatonic mess with hubby's strategically-placed noggin. She even does a guest spot on "Bewitched," reading her lines to toneless stand-ins for Sam, Darrin and company. The story keeps hopping in so many directions, zestfully directed by Banderas, that it's almost impossible to lose interest for long.
It also hops back in the direction of Peejoe's story, where strangeness generally gives way to sluggish sincerity. CRAZY IN ALABAMA plays its racial themes deadly straight, turning Peejoe into a preternaturally wise and moral lad who even gets to shake Dr. Martin Luther King's hand. In more ways than one, it's all black and white -- the buffoonishly nasty sheriff, the calmly liberal father figure, the noble African-American protesters whose plight is rendered in grainy newsreel-style footage. Everyone carries on in the expected ways on the expected subjects, all leading to the one-would-hope-obvious conclusion that segregation was a very bad thing indeed, and thank heaven for a few good white people to help set things right.
Still, the zestful style of the Lucille storyline makes it possible to get past the heavy-handedness of the Peejoe storyline ... until Lucille returns to Industry. Thus is set in motion one of the most painful courtroom finales in cinema's long, sad history of painful courtroom finales, presided over by Rod Steiger as the judicial equivalent of Col. Kurtz. First Lucille tells her tale of woe to the jury, rambling on about the horrors of domestic abuse for reasons too contrived to fathom. You'd suspect it was a matter of Banderas indulging his real-life leading lady, if not for the fact that Steiger follows Lucille's monologue with a rant of his own. Banderas loses complete control over his actors at the film's conclusion. Worse yet, the film takes two sensitive issues -- the subjugation of African-Americans and the subjugation of women -- and, in attempting to equate them, doesn't do justice to either one. It's a tragic miscalculation in a film which at least had a chance when it was quirky and frivolous. The real craziness in CRAZY IN ALABAMA is that a viewer might spend so much time giving it the benefit of the doubt.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Southern discomforts: 4.
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