Directed by Scott Cooper
In his many offhandedly brilliant performances–from the callow quarterback Duane in The Last Picture Show (1971) to the over-garrulous would-be pulp novelist in Hearts of the West (a little-known gem from 1975) to a New Orleans aristocrat interested in body building in Stay Hungry (1976) to the emotionally dead cocktail pianist in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) to the ultimate Los Angeles beach bum stoner in The Big Lebowski (1998)–Bridges has made it his life’s work to detail the luxurious benefits and emotional costs of being an American boy, no matter his age. And now, in a fine new film called Crazy Heart that will almost certainly win him an Oscar as best actor in March, the Bridges boy hits bottom.
You’ve seen Crazy Heart before. There’s a section of Tender Mercies here, a swatch of The Wrestler there, and a bit of One Trick Pony, all sewn together with a thread from The Lost Weekend. We meet up with a 57-year-old down-on-his-luck country singer named Bad Blake as he pulls up to his latest and worst-ever gig in his 1978 Ford Silverado: He’s due to play the lounge of a bowling alley in an entirely unpicturesque New Mexico town.
Bad never quite reached the first rank as a performer, but he is universally considered a brilliant songwriter. “I used to be somebody,” he warbles in the movie’s first song, “but now I’m somebody else.” Bad hasn’t been able to come up with a new tune in three years, as his alcoholism has (we infer) begun to rob him of his wits.
Bridges looks like every country singer from the 1970s rolled into one, and when he sings he sounds like them too. Bad Blake has an easy and unforced professionalism; no matter what, he tells someone, he has never missed a show, though he might have to run backstage and vomit during one of them.
Crazy Heart asks–like all dramas about a drunk–whether this splendid wreck can be saved from himself. He has the usual encounter with a doctor who tells him he’s given his body all the beating it can take and that if he doesn’t quit drinking and smoking he’s going to die. And he comes upon a lovely young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with an adorable child who seem together to offer the promise of a new life. Add to this the sudden encouragement of his onetime protégé, the country superstar Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), and Bad Blake might be on the way back.
It is to the credit of Scott Cooper, a young actor who has done a bravura job writing and directing his first film (based on a 1987 novel by Thomas Cobb), that he doesn’t make it anywhere near as easy for Bad Blake as Tender Mercies made it for Robert Duvall’s similarly troubled country singer, who straightens up and flies right almost immediately. (To be fair, Tender Mercies is a movie about the mysterious workings of redemption, about what happens after someone goes on the wagon; but even so, giving up the sauce doesn’t seem much of a strain for Duvall’s Mac Sledge.) All the good news in the world can’t keep Bad from the bottle.
The detail work in Crazy Heart is beautifully rendered: the look of Bad’s guitar, the Spanish soap operas Bad watches on motel TVs because, after spending a lifetime in motel rooms, they are the only things he hasn’t seen. The supporting performances are beautifully rendered too, particularly the wonderful turn by the hothead Irish actor Colin Farrell, unrecognizably sweet and authoritative as the sideman-turned-superstar who wants to repay an old emotional debt. (Robert Duvall, who was one of the producers, has a small part as Bad’s only friend, and he makes you miss his increasingly rare presence on the screen even more.) But the movie is Bridges, who is in nearly every shot. And what he brings to the part, a particular quality that only he could bring, is that Bad is just a boy nearing 60–charming, winning, entirely undisciplined, oddly guileless, living from hour to hour, unable to control his desire for instant gratification. He may have a devastated body ruined by hard living, but that is the result of a failure to mature. Ultimately, then, the dramatic question of the touching and understated Crazy Heart–and it is the central dramatic question behind the indelible career of Jeff Bridges–is not whether Bad Blake will sober up, but whether he will become a man before he kills himself by staying a boy.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
