‘Crazy Heart’ is crazy good

Jeff Bridges is one of those actors who was going to nab an Oscar sooner or later, and thankfully he earned his Academy Award for a quality role in a quality film.

Crazy Heart, which was released in 2009, tells the story of Bad Blake, a down-on-his-luck country music singer who has seen his fame dwindle and his belly swell.

The audience first meets him when he’s about to play before a small crowd at a bowling alley lounge. He exits his truck, dumps out the urine that he’s stored in a water jug and takes a look at the landscape around him. It’s a perfect opening scene because it sets the mood for the 112-minute film. The audience is not about to watch a rags-to-riches type of story; this is a tale of someone no longer in the warmth of the limelight.

Bridges is the best attribute of the movie, mostly because he doesn’t overplay the part. He’s a man without a dollar in his pocket and hardly a full tank of gas in his aging vehicle.

The actor is able to give Bad Blake an undeniable charm in his dealings with the few fans who attend his concerts. One can still see hints of that old Texan with the tried-and-true voice shining through. Of course, those hints are growing few and far between, mostly because Bad is an alcoholic who sucks on the whiskey bottle as if it were a pacifier.

When he pulls up to a small town, drunk and tired, Bad is asked whether he would give the local newspaper an interview. He agrees reluctantly, and the decision changes his life.

I was fully expecting Crazy Heart to head off the tracks at this point in the story. Typically, when a film tries to tell the story of a legend, even a fictional one, some type of convenient plot device comes into play. When I saw that a reporter was entering the picture, I definitely thought that the film was going to enter a stage of flashbacks about Bad’s big triumphs in his earlier days. The whole reporter-source dynamic has been used many times before to tell the story of a person’s life.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Crazy Heart doesn’t fall into that trap. The film is not interested in the past; it’s interested in looking at how the present deals with the past. Jean Craddock (an impressive Maggie Gyllenhaal), the novice reporter assigned to the story, enters Bad’s life and offers him a second chance at settling down and finding some semblance of permanence.

The love affair that Bad and Jean work their way through is actually quite touching. There’s an age differential certainly, and both of these people come with baggage (Bad has a son he hasn’t seen in years, while Jean has a son that she dotes over constantly), but somehow they find a spark and keep it lit.

Crazy Heart will be remembered as the film that earned Bridges his long-due Oscar, but Gyllenhaal’s work and a supporting role by Robert Duvall deserve equal credit. In fact, the entire movie, directed by Scott Cooper, deserves to be recognized as a gem. Bridges is certainly the central part, but his great performance magically appears in a great film as well, and that’s a rarity.

I’m crazy about Crazy Heart, and by the end, I was rooting for Bad to make a comeback, hoping he kicked the bottle and fell into pure love.

A quick note about the singing: Bridges has a nice, raspy voice that complements the movies well. The country songs are genuinely good country songs in the old style of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. It’s no wonder the movie won for Best Actor and Best Original Song (“The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett) at the Oscars.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Crazy Heart

• 2009
  

• Written and Directed by Scott Cooper, based on a book by Thomas Cobb
  

• Starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall

• Running time: 112 minutes

• Rated R for language and brief sexuality
  

• Rating:

Revised