Banderas' directorial debut has enough plots for two movies. In one, crazy Lucille (Griffith) chops off her husband's head and flees to Hollywood to become a star. In another, a small black boy, Taylor Jackson (Miller), is the victim of brutally vicious racism, sparking a heated civil rights battle. All of this is seen through the eyes of Peejoe (Black), a young boy who recounts the events with a nostalgic memory, bringing all of the various subplots together.
2.
Antonio Banderas' directorial debut opens in the sweltering summer of 1965, and everyone in Alabama has gone completely crazy, especially 12-year-old Peejoe's glamorous Aunt Lucille (Melanie Griffith). Deciding not to let her abusive husband stand in the way of her dreams of television stardom, she gets rid of him in a most unusual way and leaves Peejoe (Lucas Black) with lots of questions and one explosive secret. Accompanied only by her hatbox and its mysterious contents, Lucille tries to evade both the cops and her demons on her hilarious journey to Hollywood, while Peejoe is left behind with his uncle (David Morse) in Alabama. And as he tries to steer clear of the cunning sheriff (Meat Loaf Aday), Peejoe learns which secrets to keep and which ones to tell in this poignant comedy about the price of freedom and why it's always worth it, whatever the cost.
3.
It's clear why Melanie Griffith saw Mark Childress's bestselling book Crazy in Alabama, as the perfect vehicle for herself. The role of Lucille, a beautiful, battered wife in rural Alabama who dreams of glamorous movie stardom, is tailor-made for her. Griffith's husband, Antonio Banderas, has done quite a respectable job guiding her in this, his directorial debut; her performance--compelling, funny, and warm--is her best since Something Wild. (She also looks simply smashing.) Otherwise, the film is a curious amalgam of genres: an antic, surreal Southern Gothic comedy combined with a deadly serious civil-rights parable. As the movie opens, in the summer of 1965, Lucille (Griffith) has just murdered her abusive husband and is blowing town for Hollywood with his head in a Tupperware container. Scenes of her wacky cross-country road trip are interspersed with incidents back in Alabama involving clashes between protesting blacks and murderously intolerant whites. One can't imagine how these two seemingly disparate narrative lines will come together, but they do, in a surprisingly effective manner. The moral of both stories turns out to be: "You can bury freedom, but you can't kill it". Stand-out performances by Robert Wagner, as Lucille's Hollywood agent; Rod Steiger, as a quirky Southern judge; Lucas Black (Sling Blade) as Lucille's highly principled young nephew; and, believe it or not, Meat Loaf, as a brutal, bigoted Southern sheriff give the film an additional boost. --Laura Mirsky
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