Crazy Heart
The gruffly gentle ramblings of a broken country music star saunter into the spotlight for a sweet, yet emotionally underwhelming tribute in the miniaturized movie Crazy Heart. The tribute is as much an homage to old-fashioned country tunes as it is a respectable tip of the hat to grand performer Jeff Bridges. The aging actor plays Bad Blake, a man who has long since drowned his fame and fortune in a sea of alcohol and personal regret.
Bad Blake is supposed to be some sort of country music pioneer who once mentored fictional superstar Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell, who is so convincing that he must have been a country singer in a past life), but now Blake is stuck playing gigs in bowling alleys and dusty bars. He still has a handful of fans, enough to ensure the occasional free drink, but his glory days are long behind him, awash in a haze of malignant memories.
When the movie begins, Bad Blake is in a rough spot, having fallen from grace long ago and now spending his time scraping the booze-soaked bottom of the metaphorical barrel. Things can't get much worse for Blake, so it isn't the least bit surprising that the story quickly becomes a tale of things getting much better. Blake meets a young reporter named Jane (Maggie Gyllenhaal, calling upon her many charms to bring this feisty, loving single mother to life) and it isn't long before Blake's road to redemption comes into focus.
Bridges and Gyllenhaal make a confounding couple, but they have enough raw chemistry to prevent the 20-year gap in their ages from being too distracting. It's never entirely believable that this smart young woman trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of her romantic past would actually fall head over heels for a stumbling, sweaty drunkard, but Bridges and Gyllenhaal lend the movie an authenticity that is absent from the script.
Therein lies the central strength and weakness of Crazy Heart. The acting is so solid, so comfortably weathered, that the performances make up for the uninspired plot twists and hackneyed attempts at stirring up some conflict. Debut filmmaker Scott Cooper adapts the screenplay from a 1987 novel by Thomas Cobb and the result is a predictable pancake with little imagination and scarcely a shred of narrative energy. However, as the movie's director, Cooper fares somewhat better by guiding the actors to intriguing places.
Bridges is especially fun to watch as a man whose sense of purpose is defined by whiskey and some meaningless female companionship. He moves with the crumpled swagger of a fallen star from the moment we meet him and he gargles his line deliveries in a manner that is both morosely messy and wonderfully endearing. He's a pretty lovable guy, even though he's a hulking mass of melted male charisma, left to simmer in his own sweat.
Cooper never misses an opportunity to remind us that Bad Blake is more than a little rough around the edges, which leads to multiple moments featuring urine and vomit. Blake is a mess, but while Cooper illustrates this fact with plain, generic ability, Bridges makes the character shine. In his hands, Blake is much more than the sum of his damaged parts. The character may be thinly etched on paper, but Bridges adds depth and dimension to this portrait of a man struggling to regain control of his life.
Like so many cinematic tales of the hole left by a loss of privilege and the redemption that follows the downward spiral, Crazy Heart is a familiar story made memorable by the actors. Scott Cooper's work as screenwriter is serviceable at best and his direction is quite decent, without ever being uniquely impressive. But Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal, along with Robert Duvall, who is delightful in a few brief appearances, strike a chord of carefully orchestrated creativity. They give Crazy Heart a touching voice that soothes the soul with its sorrowful sweetness. Ryan Bingham's exquisite song titled The Weary Kind also captures a lovely sound and tone that perfectly closes out the show. Like its protagonist, Crazy Heart is a bit dishevelled and a tad lumbering, but it still manages to satisfy with its open honesty and amorous authenticity.
