“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