Crazy Heart

Snapshot: Brilliant acting by Jeff Bridges and some solid performances by others hold up a movie that has an incoherent, low intensity albeit realistic story. The score of the movie (which is mostly country music) is also pretty good.

Highlights from the plot: "Crazy Heart" is not your average motivational movie with strong dialogue and high intensity drama. It follows a sober and a rather unusual romantic story. The story is loosely knit by a few incidents that follow the life of a very talented country musician who is also a raging alcoholic and a chain smoker. On one hand the lack of grandiose drama makes the story more plausible and real but at the same time some may feel that its devoid of depth or intensity.

What's Good: Witty humor (its pretty funny), The acting is top notch especially Jeff Bridges, The score is good (especially if you like country music), The treatment given to the story is fresh in some ways

What's Bad: The story does not SEEM to go in any particular direction. The pace is also a tad slow. The chemistry between Jeff & Maggie is kinda offbeat

Who should watch it: People who really appreciate character development and who expect multi- dimensional characters etc. (Jeff Bridges character might be a treat for such folks), folks who expect a good score

Who should avoid it: Anyone who seeks out some high tension drama, powerful dialogue and a fast paced story should stay away from this one.

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.

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

People have already started the comparison, and not without some reason, of Crazy Heart with last year's film about a down-on-his-luck old timer in his chosen profession, The Wrestler. And sure the comparisons can be made quite a lot, not simply due to the same studio, Fox Searchlight, distributing the films, or that the main characters are practically washed-up in what they do but keep chugging along, or that they have medical problems, or that they're estranged from their kids, or that the woman in their lives is a stop-go-stop affair. The good news is the movies can stand on their own terms, but somehow, at the end of the day, I would probably prefer Aronofsky's gritty naturalism over the first time director Scott Cooper's more slick indie-treatment, with country and wide-open spaces substituting for grisly New Jersey.

And yet you should go see Crazy Heart, and it's not just for Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, a country musician, 57, who has been on hard times for a while and whose main problem, alcoholism, prevents him from being an unstoppable musical force (think Johnny Cash with a little extra blues) and kind boyfriend to Jean (Gyllenhaal, also quite good). Well, it could almost be all for him - it's marvelous to see him transform into this character, somewhat reminiscent of 'the Dude', but with a more cynical view of life and his former partner (Tommy, surprisingly done by Colin Farrell), and how we really do want him to get better. It's a sympathetic portrait done by a master of American film acting, and even if you don't particularly love Country music it's a worthwhile venture to see him in it.

That's the other thing: the music is actually (and this is coming from a not-big-fan of Country music save for some exceptions like Cash and Williams) quite superb. All of the songs are charged either by a real drive to bring the house down with the joy of playing live, or by the tender moments such as the "Weary Kind" title track, which may, along with Bridges, get T-Bone Burnett his first Oscar nod. The music is one of the things that makes Blake's journey wonderful to watch, even if, sadly, the story is lacking in ways that other movies (not just The Wrestler) do much better. Only a third act twist seems to be compelling, as the rest of the story kind of coasts the characters along, the only roadblock Blake's drinking.

As sometimes happens, it's a towering performance in the midst of an otherwise competent, enjoyable but slight debut feature. But it is something, and often interesting.

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.