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Crazy Heart movie review
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Imagine The Wrestler, last year’s sleeper hit about an aging “sports entertainment” icon trying to survive life in and out of a fading spotlight and substitute cowboy hats for spandex tights, Kentucky whiskey for steroids and Jeff Bridges for Mickey Rourke and you pretty much get the idea here. Not that there’s anything especially wrong with that, except that The Wrestler did put audiences in its submission hold first and arguably better.
Still, Crazy Heart director and writer Scott Cooper (not to be confused with actor Chris Cooper, as Bridges himself misspoke while accepting his well deserved Critics Choice award) has brought a touching, realistic and hopeful country fried redemption song to the big screen, or as big a screen as the film’s modest advertising budget will permit, which is to say your living room probably seats more than most theaters showing Cooper’s picture.
Crazy Heart’s story, based on Thomas Cobb’s novel, concerns aging, alcoholic C&W singer Bad Blake (Bridges) and his juiced up journey between last chance gigs and one final shot at being a semi-respectable human being. Maggie Gyllenhaal also shines as Jean Craddock, the small town music reporter and single mom who becomes the one woman who can turn Bad Blake, well..good. Not that it’s an easy or enviable task for Jean when the love of her life has flammable breath, the body-fat percentage of a manatee and is most at home on the bathroom floor. Still, when conscious, Blake writes weary heartfelt lyrics and doesn’t mean to do bad things, they just seem to turn out that way, which is what tends to happens when your constant companion’s name is on the label of your favorite hooch. Adding an interesting blip to Crazy Heart’s EKG is the great Robert Duvall who appears as Wayne, the owner of a run down Houston bar who takes Blake fishing, drops him off at rehab when he decides to get sober and following his recovery offers the AA mantra, “One day at a time.” Wayne’s not the most original thinker but anyone who will pick you up at detox is a good person to know.
At Crazy Heart’s best, it depicts one man’s long, sometimes humiliating haul trying to hang on to the one thing he is good at while not ending up in a ditch along the way from the bowling alley bar to the motel room. The one fly on the buttermilk biscuit is the speed and ease with which Blake cleans up his act and is back on the festival circuit. Thirty years of bad behavior as entrenched as the wrinkles on Blake’s forehead are smoothed out in a single flash forward to “sixteen months later”. Not to be too picky, in a multiplex full of avatars and teenage vampires, inspiring true to life tales of slaying one’s personal dragons and getting back on your own boots are hard to come by. And while The Wrestler may have been a degree edgier, Jeff Bridges may succeed where Mickey Rourke didn’t in bringing home Oscar gold. And should that come to pass, Bridges should say a gracious “gracias” to not only his director and cast, but to Sean Penn who took last year off.