"Freedom
is forever." That is the last voiceover of the nutty film
Crazy in Alabama, directed by Antonio Banderas,
based on the novel and screenplay by Mark Childress. The tagline
"Sometimes you have to lose your mind to find your freedom"
refers to two plots in the film -- civil rights and spouse
abuse. When the film begins, it is approximately 1965. Lucille
(played by Banderas's wife, Melanie Griffith) says goodbye
to her nephew, thirteen-year-old Peejoe (played by Lucas Black);
she has killed her husband and is fleeing Industry, Alabama,
to go to Hollywood to become an actress despite very little
experience. Thereafter, the film switches back and forth between
developments in both their lives, which merge again at the
end of the movie. Lucille achieves her ambition, then returns
to be put on trial, is convicted despite a ridiculous plea
for sympathy based on the cruelty of her husband, but the
judge (played by Rod Steiger) is persuaded somehow to give
her five years of a suspended sentence on condition that she
will seek psychiatric counseling, and she departs again for
Hollywood. The life of Peejoe, however, is far more interesting.
He witnesses how the redneck Sheriff John Doggett (played
by Meat Loaf Aday) accidentally killed Taylor Jackson (played
by Louis Miller), a determined teenage African American who
sought to desegregate the only public swimming pool in town,
by pulling on his shirt as he tried to escape the sheriff's
pursuit and suffered a fatal fall on his head. After Taylor's
death, the sheriff demands Peejay's silence. The African Americans
of the town hold a mass funeral, end up at the pool, many
jump into the pool, the African American undertaker who preached
the sermon at the funeral and was the first to enter the pool
is arrested, and ultimately Martin Luther King, Jr., arrives
to address a rally. When Peejoe admits in open court during
his mother's trial that the sheriff killed Taylor, federal
authorities take him into custody. The film, thus, provides
a slice of the struggle to desegregate a prototypic small
town in Alabama as well as a paradigm of how White women are
exonerated by batting eyelashes at a White judge. In short,
a serious story about racism is scotchtaped to a farcical
treatment of a Marilyn Monroeish airhead who does anything
to advance her fortunes and is applauded for getting away
with murder. MH
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