Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/15/10
Movies
are about storytelling, and as such they have the flow of stories.
Be they happy, sad or downright tragic, even the ones that resonate most
with our own experiences still bear the mark of the filmmaker as puppet
master, moving the characters to their assorted destinies. To truly
break out of that feeling, a film must combine extraordinary performances
with a certain gift for telling a tale that is neither too up- or downbeat,
one that has the true randomness of life as it is lived, as opposed to
how it is written. I can count on one hand the times at the movies
when I've felt as pulled in by the reality of a story as I was by Crazy
Heart, Scott Cooper's tale of a beaten-down country music star's wake-up
call to the possibilities life still holds for him. Jeff Bridges
is nothing less than stunning as that singer, a bundle of self-pity and
stubborn hope trying to get out. But this is no one-man show, and
his supporting players join him and their director in weaving a tale that
feels like it's actually going on somewhere outside the theater's walls.
Years
ago, Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) was a star, a beloved singer-songwriter who
packed auditoriums and launched the career of his sideman Tommy Sweet (Colin
Farrell). Now, Tommy's the star and Bad plays bowling alleys while
trying to get a new record deal and drowning his sorrows in relentless
drunkenness. At one of those small town gigs, a member of his band
for the night introduces him to his niece, aspiring journalist Jean Craddock
(Maggie Gylenhaal), who'd like an interview. Bad acquiesces, and
while he doesn't like to talk about much of his past or present, he does
like Jean, and they quickly grow closer until the interview has become
a relationship. He meets and bonds with her young son Buddy (Jack
Nation), then heads back on the road where he grudgingly takes a job opening
a show for Tommy, who'd like to patch up their fractured relationship and
asks Bad to write him some new songs. On the way back to visit Jean,
his pickup truck goes off the road, leaving him laid up for a couple weeks
at her place. There's real promise in their relationship, and against
her better judgment, she and Buddy come to visit him at his home in Houston,
where he's the house band at a bar owned by Wayne (Robert Duvall).
But how long will it be before the drinking Jean hates forces Bad Blake
to make a choice about what kind of man he wants to be?
The
only reason most moviegoers will ever even hear of Crazy Heart is
the strong likelihood that it will finally get the beloved Bridges his
first Oscar win in five nominations going back to The Last Picture Show.
And if that happens, it will be richly deserved. Not only does his
Bad Blake wear an entire lifetime of accumulated struggles and mistakes
like a suit, but this is one of the all-time great drunken performances,
never clearer than in those moments when we get to see him genuinely sober.
He's drinking himself to death, and Cooper's script (based on a novel by
Thomas Cobb) is unusually mature about the breakdown of an unhealthy older
man. When was the last time a character on-screen did any amount
of coughing without dropping dead soon thereafter? Well, Bad's in
horrible, horrible shape, but in the same way as many real people whose
conditions are eminently treatable if they only reverse their bad lifestyle
choices. And in Bridges hands, the character's coughing, puking and
blacking out are pretty scary, and not things that pass in a moment only
to return to cue us that he shouldn't make any long-term plans.
The
rest of the cast is terrific as well, with Gylenhaal in that wonderfully
down-to-Earth mode she has, skillfully playing the act of looking the other
way without ever letting us miss the fact that it takes Jean effort to
do it. Farrell, happily back in his character actor wheelhouse after
misbegotten years as a miscast movie star, takes the deceptively complex
role of Tommy and fills it out perfectly. As he says to Bad at one
point, everyone's got their own life to live, and while his mentor sees
all of Tommy's choices as being about him, they're really just about Tommy.
Sooner or later, the student must break free of the teacher, and there's
no malice in Tommy's hesitation to be too closely aligned with Bad while
still trying to help him out when it's not too much of an inconvenience
to him. Duvall can be one of the movies most murderously disapproving
father figures, but he can also be one of the warmest, and here he's nicely
cast in the later mode and even gets to sing a little himself.
Crazy
Heart's music is excellent, and that's a big reason why it's so much
easier than usual to buy Bad and Tommy as Country stars. Bad's trademark
hit “Floating and Falling” leads a solid roster of songs it's easy to believe
are the backbone of a real career, and the wonderful Ryan Bingham-penned
“The Weary Kind” which he writes during the movie's second half is a perfect
distillation of the movie's message you could still imagine being a hit.
Bridges (who once released an album himself) and Farrell are surprisingly
adept singers, and master the body language of a performer onstage.
As
I mentioned, the script manages to dodge most of the cliches its assorted
health crises, drunken screw-ups, break-ups and triumphs would suggest
because it mixes the outcomes enough to remind us that those cliches are
born of common life experiences. Sometimes broken things can be mended,
sometimes not. Sometimes the people who set us on our path in life
aren't meant to share that journey with us. And sometimes there are
happy endings, just not quite as happy as we might wish.
Crazy
Heart is a real gem among this season's crop of independent films,
brilliantly acted and emotionally resonant and filled with fine country
music (spoken as a guy who's not usually a fan of the genre). And
if there isn't really a Bad Blake out there putting on a show tonight,
it's not because the movie, and Jeff Bridges, didn't do their best to summon
him to life. |
