Crazy Heart

'Crazy Heart' is a simple but emotionally resonant movie about a 57-year-old alcoholic country singer whose career is on the skids. There's not much to the story, but not much is necessary with Jeff Bridges as the singer, Bad Blake; Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet, his handsome acolyte, now a big country music star; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean Craddock, a small-time New Mexico journalist with a four-year-old boy who has lousy luck with men, and falls for Bad; and Robert Duvall as Wayne, the singer's clean-and-sober bartender-protector.

Bridges, Gyllenhaal and Farrell have never been better, and Duvall is always pure gold. This movie is Bridges' chance to give a master class in acting, and he does not disappoint for a minute, but he's not alone in the spotlight, and the depth of support he gets is what makes Crazy Heart worth watching.

A lifelong musician and many-talented artist (painting, photography, ceramics) whose thespian preeminence in Hollywood has yet to win him an Oscar, Jeff Bridges inhabits the songs he sings on screen as convincingly and seamlessly as he fits into the shambles of a life and mess of a body that is the film's protagonist. This musical integrity is important because Bad Blake is one of those disintegrating performers whose art has not faltered, though his life has. The songs he sings are his own, and when he's on stage, he's alive. The rest of the time he's lying, deceiving, or numbing out. A great line is when he's asked by Jean where his songs come from and he replies simply, "Life, unfortunately."

A parallel to Bridges' work in 'Crazy Heart' is the similarly lived-in and authentic performance as a waning dance hall singer by Gérard Depardieu in Xavier Giannoli's 'The Singer'/'Quand j'étais chanteur,' a richly atmospheric little film released but barely seen in the US. But the milieu here is very different, and as American as 'The Singer's' is French. First time director Scott Cooper has said this movie tells "Merle Haggard's' story and Kris Kristofferson's and Waylon Jennings'. As Bad Blake, Jeff moves like Waylon, he has Merle Haggard's songwriting ability and Kris Kristofferson's charisma." Of course Bridges looks a lot like Kristofferson, and Bad Blake puts his hard times into his felt, authentic compositions as Waylon and Merle did. The songs are composed by T Bone Burnett, and are fine; more authenticity is added through other songs such as Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" and Waylon Jennings' "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way." Burnett composed the songs with the late Stephen Bruton; and the closing ballad, "The Losing Kind," with Ryan Bingham. Farrell as well as Bridges does his own singing, and his Irishness merges fairly convincingly into a slick country style. Just as Bad Blake is the mentor of Tommy Sweet, in real life Robert Duvall has become a mentor of the actor-writer-director, so his presence anchors the film and presides over it. Bridges knew of the movie but held off from committing to it till he learned his friend Burnett was in, so this is project that must have felt right, ultimately, for all concerned.

Bridges' Bad Blake is so authentically blousy and pathetic he's hard to look at sometimes. He's always drunk and at an opening gig at a Pueblo, Coloradi bowling rink, throws up in a back alley between songs, while the young pickup band he's saddled with has to fill in. In Santa Fe Jean shows up to do an interview, and a May-December romance develops as Bad woos Jean against her better judgment and plies her little boy with homemade pancakes (the boy is hungry for a man in his life and Bad oozes charm, when he's conscious). Gyllenhaal, who played a character struggling with addiction and recovery herself in 'SherryBaby,' gives a performance as a women warring inside with loneliness and need. Her scenes with Bridges are central to the movie, and the chemistry is strong between them.

Blake hasn't written songs for some years, but when he meets up with Tommy prior to a date opening for him to an audience of 12,00 in Denver, Tommy begs him to write some for him. In this way the screenplay manages to steer a course, perhaps a bit too easily, between success and failure. Clearly Bad Blake is still working, even if it's at lousy venues, and to prove it he's always on the phone to a hard-nosed Manager (James Keane) who's finding him the best gigs he can. This eventually leads to a contract to compose songs for an album with Tommy.

'Crazy Heart,' which was written by Cooper from the eponymous novel by Thomas Cobb, is perhaps a bit schematic about the up-down-up trajectory of the talented loser, but it manages to be pretty realistic about the degeneration that is terminal alcoholism. Here, however, it's not a slide into hell like Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas. Though only by the skin of his teeth, and with multiple ailments a car crash reveals, Bad is surviving. So when the moment comes and he hits his bottom, he still has the strength to straighten out. Maybe the fast-forward finale is a bit too upbeat, but the memory the movie leaves is, of course, of Bridges with a bottle, a guitar, and a sad sweet song, and of some of the year's best movie acting.

This is a sweet and believable film about real people. The story is anything but original, and yet it is done very nicely, with kind, genuine performances and a majestic Jeff Bridges. One very good move is that the director and screenwriter put most of the exaggeration and cliches at the beginning of the movie in order for us to "get' the characters. In doing so, the movie got more interesting and realistic as it went on.

The pleasure to see Jeff Bridges playing a man ready to start a whole new life, a day a the time, is indescribable. And as if that wasn't enough, love is the inspiring factor the motivating force. I've been a fan of Jeff Bridges since I first saw him in "The Last Picture Show", then "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot", "Fat City" right up to "The Big Lebowski" He's never less than totally there. Truthful and powerful even when he plays characters that are the opposite of truthful, the opposite of powerful that even don't seem to be there. "Crazy Heart" reminds us. He's one of the greatest American actors of his or any other generation. His face when he realizes he lost the little boy will haunt me forever. At the Golden Globes, in his devastating charismatic, humble way he thanked his parents. I thank them too Jeff, you are a wonder.

"Petition me no petitions, sir, to-day; Let other hours be set apart for business. To-day it is our pleasure to be drunk . . ." Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb, The Great

When a memorable performance transcends a mediocre plot, the result is a memorable role flanked by a forgettable film. Such is the case of Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, a sodden wreck of a country singer still making a living playing at bars and bowling alleys in Crazy Heart, an apt title.

Not Garth Brooks or Willie Nelson, but well-known enough to be offered free booze and free ladies, 57 year old Bad is like his 30 year old pickup truck, still serviceable but ready to bust at any moment. Bridges is a believable singer/drunk, not overdoing either but pathetic enough for you to want to strangle some sense into him while he still can perform. And write songs—if he can get to them, especially at the encouragement of Tommy Sweet (a convincing, real life bad boy Colin Farrell), young country singer now flourishing partly because of Bad's good mentoring. The descent into cliché is quick as Santa Fe reporter Jane (Maggie Gyllenhaal) falls for him during an interview for her paper. She has a four-year old child—well, you can guess the rest of the film through romance and rehab but maybe not denouement.

The addition of one of the producers of the film, Robert Duvall, as Bad's friend and club owner Wayne, is a welcome allusion to Duvall's Oscar performance as country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies. Add T Bone Burnett as a song writer and producer of the film and you have a promising pedigree. Unfortunately director/writer Scott Cooper may not have caught the fire of the original novel by Thomas Cobb.

I will nominate Bridges as one of the best actors of the year. That's the best I can offer you besides the New Mexico landscape and cloud dotted blue sky. As for watching another story about an alcoholic singer, I'll stick with Colin Firth drinking a little in A Single Man or Michael Sheen in the Damned United. The drunken hero is one of my damned.

There's a shot in a scene near the beginning of Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart that's so jarring that it has to have been a choice, but I can't for the life of me unpack what it means. Jeff Bridges plays forgotten country legend Bad Blake, drunk and down on his luck, a one-time great forced to play tiny New Mexico bars for tiny over-the-hill crowds. As he cruises into town in his rusty Suburban and empties out his pee bottle, he realizes that his manager has booked him to play in a bowling alley, where he begins to drink prior to the show. There's a shot of him at the bar that is an exact visual echo of Bridge's most famous character of recent years, the similarly booze-addled Dude from The Big Lebowski, famously bellying up to a bowling alley bar, talking to a cowboy. It's odd and unmistakable, as Bridges' the Dude in the Cohen Bros. first-cult-then-full-blown classic dopey caper movie has become iconic, his sozzled, affronted complaints as firmly lodged in the minds of movie folk as Travis Bickle's spookyisms or the monologue by the guy in Network who got mad and told everybody to go yell out the window.

Where the Dude's drunk and drugged wanderings seemed blessed, though, by a cinematic ray of Private Eye light that kept him safe through to the end of his caper, Bridges' Bad Blake is broken down, on the way out. A member of his backing band that he had mentored, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), has moved on to find incredible success on his own and exists, but is unwilling to do an album of duets that Blake and his lizard-skin booted agent need to pull his career out of the toilet. He meets a young journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who herself has had a rough patch and their bruised romance sees Blake back on some kind of road to life.

Bridges inhabits the role as thoroughly as is seemingly possible - he quite simply is Bad Blake. Much of the music (composed by T-Bone Burnett, who among other things did the music for the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) Bridges sings himself and he's got a not-half-bad country voice, but it's in the busted-boot gait and whisky-sipping slouch that Bridges carves the character out. The rest of the film is almost as good as he is. Cooper's script has a habit of freely dipping into the well of cliché - the whisky soaked forgotten crooner lost in the shadow of inauthentic "new country", salvation and sobriety at the feet of a sad single mother who doesn't want to be hurt again - but then at the last minute, swerving away into if not original then certainly less clichéd territory. Tommy Sweet, when he makes his entrance into the story, is not half the villain the first half of the film would have you believe, and Gyllenhaal's single mom is something a hair's breadth more interesting than a sucker for punishment, loyal to a fault. The film could have been a disaster, and at times it's half-way there, but there are enough smart choices in the script and good performances from interesting actors that the film ends up (for the most part) overcoming its own flaws.

It does country well, and it's as authentic as a film can be to a genre of music (like punk, or metal, or rap) that is itself so utterly cliché ridden that arguments over whether so-and-so is "real country" are a common fervent pastime for fans and the artists themselves. Bad Blake seems as much of a real, breathing human being as Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings, which is obviously somewhat of a back-handed compliment. Crazy Heart's story is an old one: a busted down, down and out nobody screws up, hits bottom, and becomes somebody again. We've seen it before, but it has enough soul and Bridges' Blake has enough human hitch in his step, that it manages to be moving, if not refreshing. 7/10