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What gives? Despite being one of the more worthwhile movies of recent weeks, the first film directed by Antonio Banderas, starring wife Melanie Griffith, hardly registered a blip at the boxoffice on opening weekend. Of the five new wide releases, it was last in ticket sales, failing to crack the top ten (#15); it even got beat out by Bats. For crying out loud, it barely made more money for the week than last month’s release The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland.
This bears looking into.
Crazy in Alabama is narrated (gee, that’s a popular device lately) by Peejoe (Lucas Black, from Sling Blade and the cult TV series “American Gothic”), a young orphan who in the summer of 1965 is living with his grandmother in the backwater burg of Industry City, AL. As the tale kicks off, his Aunt Lucille (Griffith), a longsuffering mother of seven, “blew into town, and nothing was ever the same.” She has just killed her abusive husband Chester (who is never seen) and hidden his body in the meat freezer, an act whose ergonomic considerations required the removal of his head. Long harboring ambition to become a famous pseudonymed actress, she deposits her brood for temporary safekeeping with Meemaw before heading out to Hollywood, sentimentally toting Chester’s noggin in a Tupperware cake saver. The fresh influx of high-maintenance boarders necessitates Peejoe’s moving in with Uncle Dove (David Morse -- The Rock), the town’s coroner and sole white mortician.
This loopy opening (following, in an era when some directors seem to expend all their ideas before the movie even gets properly started, a delightful credit sequence) sets both Lucille and Peejoe on parallel quests for truth, justice, and The American Way that will run each of them afoul of Industry City’s racist sheriff, Doggett (Meat Loaf*). She escapes to California and gets discovered by an agent (Robert Wagner, as always sounding as if his voice is coming from somewhere offscreen) who gets her a bit part on “Bewitched,” but back home Doggett is doing his damnedest to track her down. He’s also trying to cover up his role in the death of a young black civil-rights protester, witnessed by Peejoe. The two storylines eventually come back together in the hometown courtroom of a judge (the marvelously resurgent Rod Steiger; he’ll don judicial robes again in the upcoming The Hurricane, and a clerical collar in Schwarzennegger’s End of Days) whose wisdom makes Solomon look like a first-round reject from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
As with Bringing Out the Dead, nice casting, thoughtful direction, and a lyrical script (by Mark Childress, in a rarity doing a good job of adapting his own novel) come together in an appealing unity. Griffith looks and sounds right as Lucille, her now-zoftig form fitting the 60s bombshell image. As for Lucas Black, it’s difficult to heap enough praise on a kid who, even though he seems to be essentially playing the same character -- himself -- in everything he does, unfailingly holds your attention (it’s hard not to like somebody who someday hopes to be a successful professional bass-fisherman rather than a successful professional actor, and who blew off this movie’s high-zoot premiere rather than miss a game playing for his high school football team). Behind the camera, Banderas is a natural behind, crafting memorable images that will stick in my head long after Bats has spawned a dozen video games.
Some exec at Columbia must be jealous of Antonio, seeing how the movie opened on only 1200 screens (by comparison, the Martin Lawrence comedy Blue Streak is still on 1500 screens after two-and-a-half months). Do yourself a favor and go see Crazy in Alabama. If you don’t like it, bring your ticket stub down here to the Creative Loafing office, and I personally promise they’ll buy you a new Hyundai. B+
* In the credits he’s referred to as “Meat Loaf Aday.” That’s not a joke -- “What’s he eat?” “A meat loaf a day.” -- but his real last name. Who knew? And why bring it up now? Maybe the marketing department at Columbia Pictures simply got fed up with fielding questions like, “Excuse me, is Mr. Loaf any relation to Pimento?”
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