Eve's Bayou

My A.D.D.* has gotten worse over time, to the point where it's challenging for me to sit still and watch a 90-minute film in one sitting.  108 minutes?  You must be out of your mind.  And yet, Eve's Bayou dares to plunge that running time into my chest, like a stake to the heart of Dracula.  My ticker remains intact.  That must mean writer/director Kasi Lemmons did something right at the helm of this Southern Gothic voodoo drama.  I remember when it came out.  The year was 1997, so I was ensconced in middle school.  The only things on my mind were girls and the latest Deftones album (EDITOR'S NOTE: Around the Fur is still my favorite batch of Deftones songs).

I knew that Eve's Bayou appealed to me, but I was too stubborn to check it out.  If it wasn't an overt, transparent horror show, then I wasn't interested.  I won't pretend that I've made any drastic changes (let's be honest, all of us are still teenagers), but modern day Dom is certainly more open to bench-testing entertainment that piddles on the circumference of the genre.  That's where our subject resides.  The plot follows a little girl, the titular Eve, who becomes wise to her father's philandering ways.  This epiphany shatters the image of dear ol' Dad as a paragon of virtue and reframes her relationship with her witchy aunt.  Yes, witchy.  Eve relies on sortilege and the black arts to punish the wicked.

I should make a distinction here, as the movie is less Practical Magic and more Angel Heart.  We're dealing with a nasty brand of voodoo, although this isn't exactly a bloodbath either.  Eve's Bayou is elegant.  The cast is teeming with actors who won awards for other pictures.  Why this flick was ignored by the Academy is anyone's best guess.  Samuel L. Jackson turns in a multi-layered performance as an unchaste doctor, while a young Jurnee Smollett is just as captivating as his impressionable daughter.  I dug Vondie Curtis-Hall as the flaxen-haired Julian Grayraven.  Suddenly, I have the urge to name my next pet Julian Grayraven.

Eve's Bayou gets downright Shakespearean at times, which is where it loses its footing.  It's my opinion that the characters become too ostentatious for their own good, too "showy."  Hardly a dealbreaker, and I have a hunch that my problem has more to do with Shakespeare than anything that Lemmons conjures.  I've always hated Shakespeare.  Whatever!  I recommend sampling "Lotion" and "Shut Up and Drive (Far Away)" before buying the record in full.  *I'm officially undiagnosed, but my attention does drift.  Not that you could tell from reading a review.