“Son, I’ve played sick, drunk, divorced and on the run. Bad Blake hasn’t missed a goddam show in his whole fucking life.”
Road-weary, beaten-by-life character gets out of pickup truck. Casually dumps a jug of piss into the parking lot of a bowling alley as he surveys his surroundings. Meaningful sigh as camera pans out to more clearly depict Jeff Bridges.
If you’re not immediately thinking that this is the opening scene of “The Big Lebowksi 2,” you’re simply not human. Yet, instead, this is our introduction to “Crazy Heart”—one of the most stirring and powerful movies of recent vintage.
Based on a novel, and written and directed by Scott Cooper, this flick follows the travails of a washed-up country & western star, Bad Blake, as the last embers of his career slowly fade, shadowing him as he steers himself in a drunken stupor around the United States, sitting in the audience as he trades off on his name for ugly sex in hotel rooms and free booze. His life has become an endless string of motels and prairies, honky tonks peopled with desperate cougars and those trying to hold onto what he once represented. The country and the scenery is undeniably beautiful, but also calls up images of a decaying tumbleweed drifting aimlessly as it approaches a canyon dropoff.
One poignant scene shows this 57-year-old, shirtless, overweight, alcoholic hemorrhoid-stricken has-been … as he delicately takes care of his guitar, silently polishing the only thing that holds any meaning to him in yet another dark, dirty and nondescript hotel room. The comedic intertwines with the tragic when Bridges dedicates a song to an elderly couple, then runs off the stage to throw up.
Created as an amalgam of Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard, Blake interweaves a series of memorable lines amidst his train-wreck-ish series of mishaps and stumbles:
Blake on good songs:
“That’s the way it is with good ones—you’re sure you’ve heard it before.”
Blake on agents:
“If you found out your sister was turning $5 tricks, you’d overbook her.”
Blake on fatherhood:
“I wasn’t there even when I was.”
Hope arrives in the form of a small-town reporter named Jean, played by the always-great Maggie Gyllenhaal. In her shy interactions with Blake, we see the seeds of mild flirtation in her interview with the fading star. She obviously looks up to him, but when she asks about kids, he gets upset and quickly ends the interview.
A break-neck-paced courtship ensues, and almost before he realizes it, Blake tells Jean that he loves her. However, after a disturbing wreck and a recovery that features a doctor matter-of-factly telling Blake to stop smoking, stop drinking and lose 25 pounds, he reaches rock bottom. Wracked by withdrawals, Blake seems resigned to live out the rest of his life, feeling it’s much too late to change his course despite the arrival in his life of Jean and her son Buddy.
What once was an empty, depressing life for Blake gathers meaning through Jean and Buddy, with hints of the “Jerry Maguire”-ish premise of finding your purpose and identity through the child rather than the mother. Yet even as Blake attempts to reunite with his now-28-year-old son after nearly a quarter of a century, we see that this isn’t yet who he is, that he isn’t prepared to absorb the body-blows of rejection and accountability. Amazingly, this hard-edged and prickly road warrior is still too fragile and lacking in self-esteem to become the man that Jean sees underneath the surface.
In the most horrifying scene in the movie, Blake loses the child after he stops for a drink in a mall restaurant. He gets called out by a rent-a-cop, then frantically searches for the kid in a truly emotional scene. His slide is heart-breaking, and becomes really difficult to watch.
In terms of issues with the movie, the relatable—and familiar—storyline of his rivalry with up-and-coming star Tommy Sweet is a necessary one, but the casting of Colin Farrell in this role was both odd and off-putting. Sweet was once part of Blake’s band, and viewed Blake as a mentor, but he’s now surpassed Blake in popularity, creating an uncomfortable situation for each of them.
Also, Blake has difficult speech patterns to understand, which is at least partly by design, but can also lead to some unnecessary and story-halting confusion. It can be distracting at key moments. From more of a humorous, blooper perspective, his glasses fall off a couple of times in the movie as well, unintentionally I believe.
America’s grandfather, Robert Duvall (also a producer on the flick), makes a tremendous appearance as Wayne, a bartender and confidant of Blake’s. One of our true cinematic treasures, Duvall adds immensely to the film, combining humor (“Juan, Jesus, whatever”) with a kind of homespun advice and unflinching support of Blake.
With Wayne’s help, Blake finally makes a commitment to wanting to get sober, saying, “I’ve been drunk most of my life, and lost a helluva lot.” He goes to a rehab retreat, making for some powerful scenes. At the retreat, it is as if he is seeing the beauty he never noticed while on the road, drunk, for thousands of miles. It’s as if he is finally coming to a realization of how much he has lost and missed while viewing life through a prism of drunkenness—and what life can look like without that cloud.
When told that he just needs to take it one day at a time, the sarcastic Bad says, “Yeah, I heard that.” But now that he’s sober, he has a rebirth as Otis—his given name. This development points up the good-Bad dichotomy in the film, which represents more than just a play on words. The need to live up to the name and alter ego inherent in the “Bad” character sabotages Otis’s need to leave something lasting in the world beyond his music. Through his evolving humility throughout the arc of the story, Blake even gradually moves from third-person references to first person.
Following his rehab stint, Blake appears at Jean’s house, with the promise, “I’m changing everything.” However, the dawning realization that all he did to get sober and alter his life still didn’t work is written all over his face, creating perhaps the most emotional and poignant scene in the entire film. Jean says, “If you love us, you’ll leave us alone,” and in a truly hard scene, Blake comes home and finds Buddy’s Superman shirt, and he picks up the phone, stares at it, lets the moment linger … then eventually hangs it up.
He writes a song for her called “One More Try,” but 16 months pass before he sees her again. For Blake, the gift of meeting her—and Buddy—saves his life. In a full-circle moment, the movie ends as it began, with an interview between Blake and (a now-married) Jean, now with a much more beautiful setting and backdrop. The pain evident in his face when he first sees and reacts to her wedding ring is jarring, and some viewers may even find it a little dusty in the theater or wherever you’re watching.
Bridges has always been vastly underrated, and his performance in this one makes it impossible for him to maintain that label—especially when you take into account a little thing called the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also demonstrates his other talents in the musical category, which led him to record his own album following the completion of this movie. His work is supplemented perfectly by that of Gyllenhall, who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Overall, "Crazy Heart" is a tremendous and moving film, spurred by an epic performance from Bridges, nuanced sublety from Gyllenhaal and a strong soundtrack ( “Weary Kind,” written by T. Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham won the Academy Award for Best Original Song). It is truly and simply a beautiful film, not just for those who love music (but especially so for you) … and even the Dude would abide that assessment.
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