"…The Good Ones Feel Like They’ve Always Been There…"As every film lover knows, Jeff Bridges has been putting in great performances for years - but “Crazy Heart” is different.
Quietly magnificent throughout the entire movie, he owns the Oscar on this one.
“Bad Blake” is a 57-year old country singer, drunk most of the time and shuffling with a cigarette in his gob towards another small time venue he doesn’t care about. As he empties a plastic carton of piss into the parking lot of a bowling alley (having been on the road for hours), he can think about only one thing – not family, not music, not love – but how can he get a bottle of McClure’s Whiskey into his liver with only $10 left in his jeans?
Without any new material to make money from, wifeless for the 4th time and with deteriorating health, “Bad” is still a legend among his fans and when he’s on stage, him and his beloved songs like “I Don’t Know” can still cut it. But the younger bucks have replaced him – especially his despised protégé Tommy Sweet (a brilliantly cast Colin Farrell) who now has 3 huge articulated trucks to haul his equipment from one arena to the next and not a beat-up convertible called ‘Bessie’.
Then “Bad” gets a lucky break. He is interviewed by a local Santa Fe journalist Jean Craddock, a divorced Mum in her Thirties with a bubbly 4-year old son Buddy whom she protects from – you guessed it - ‘bad’ men. Yet despite all her rules, both Jean and Buddy fall for the charms of the big kid with the guitar and the ten-gallon hat. And on the story goes, heartbreak to joy, joy to heartbreak and back again…
The support cast are convincingly enamored small town folks - Tom Bower as the store manager and Rick Dial as the local band's piano player. Colin Farrell sings amazingly well too and is a perfect foil for the aging singer (he's also superb in "Ondine"). Significant others shimmy around Bad's constant verbal abuse too - Paul Herman as his long-suffering manager Jack Greene and Robert Duvall as the bar-owner who never seems to give up on "Bad" and is maybe his only real friend (Duvall is still such a great actor at 79).
Although this kind of movie harks back to Duvall’s own “Tender Mercies”, it feels a lot richer in its details. There’s a particularly tough scene where Bad decides to finally call his son of 28. Bad hasn’t seen him since he was 4 years of age – never helped him, never been there for him. There are very few words in the scene, but there’s a lot of pain. The grown-up son is not surprisingly unforgiving - especially with his Mom having passed away two years earlier. With the receiver to his ear, there is a look on Bridge’s face that is pure destruction – a horrible realization that he has caused agony with his cavalier stay-away life and won’t easily get forgiveness for it. In the hands of another actor, there might have been histrionic tears when the call abruptly finishes – but Bridges just does what an alcoholic would do, not mend his ways, but look cravenly at the kitchen for a bottle to get lost in. And on it goes until he finally does something really selfish and stupid in a shopping mall with a boy who now looks at him with affection. It’s brilliantly relaised stuff, it really is.
Niggles – his recovery is too swift and too painless – alcohol abuse over that length of time is never that easy to shake off, and even though she’s a magnificent actress, there’s a nagging disbelief in the relationship between her character and his – would she really fall for such a car-crash as “Bad Blake”. But these are minor points.
“Crazy Heart” (based on the novel by Thomas Cobb) isn’t quiet a masterpiece, but it's damn close. And while the other actors, the T-Bone Burnette music and Scott Cooper’s superb direction all add so much to the film - ultimately it belongs to its leading man. Bridges imbibes it with believability and a soul few actors could even get near.
As Jean asks what is it that makes a great song – Bad answers with the title of this review – “The good ones feel like they’ve always been there…” You may feel the same about “Crazy Heart”.
Put it high on your rental/to buy list.
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