Broken but not beaten

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Jeff Bridges inhabits the role of a faded, hard-living country singer looking for redemption.

With Jeff Bridges earning a best actor Oscar nomination for his role in Crazy Heart, the film is being touted as this year's incarnation of the 2008 drama The Wrestler.

This is understandable. Both movies are about guys on the wrong side of middle age seeking long-delayed redemption. Where Mickey Rourke's character got support from Marisa Tomei's sympathetic lap dancer, Bridges' country singer Bad Blake gets moral support from Maggie Gyllenhaal's entertainment journalist.

Make of that parallel what you will.

But the presence of Robert Duvall (in a supporting role and as one of the film's producers) should be a clue that this film (and The Wrestler, come to think of it) owes a specific debt to the 1983 film Tender Mercies, in which Duvall played an alcoholic country singer trying to mend the shattered fences of his past.

As in that film, Crazy Heart is very much a character piece dependent on that lead performance to carry the movie.

Bridges is very much up to that task. He's always been a fine actor, but he usually so inhabits his roles so closely, he barely draws attention to himself. (For the record, let me state my belief he deserved the best actor Oscar for The Big Lebowski and he wasn't even nominated.)

Bridges is entirely comfortable in the borrowed skin of Bad Blake, an old-school country singer whose songbook (actually composed by Stephen Bruton and T-Bone Burnett) of broken hearts and hangovers is actually a product of his own tumultuous personal life and not an industry songwriting factory.

On the road in his pickup truck, playing bars and bowling alleys, Blake proudly refuses to hitch his name to his former protegé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) and finds solace in one-night stands and booze.

A better solace introduces itself in the form of Jean Craddock (Gyllenhaal), a reporter who interviews Blake for her paper and ends up falling into bed with him.

A single mom, Jean has a four-year-old son and Blake sees a future for himself in the role of a father, a role he rejected when he abandoned his own biological son decades earlier.

The downside is that his old habits are hard to break.

In a film that clocks in at close to two hours, newcomer writer-director Scott Cooper relies perhaps a bit too much on Bridges' weathered appeal -- and his even more weathered singing voice -- to carry a movie that doesn't have much in the way of originality. An intimate drama does not need a running time more suited to an epic.

Even so, the time spent with Bridges and Gyllenhaal (nominated for an Oscar in the supporting actress category) does not feel wasted. After all, the best sad songs are the slow ones.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Crazy Heart.

A showcase for an actor whose deep understanding of his character is evident in every gesture and word.

-- Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press

Hand the Oscar to Jeff Bridges right now, and let's be done with it.

-- Stephen Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Bridges has re-entered Dude territory and crawled out the other side, ditching the dope, swapping the White Russians for sour mash and his bowling ball for a guitar.

-- Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix

Jeff Bridges' portrayal of broken-down, liquored-up country singer Bad Blake may be the best of his career, and that's saying something. 

-- Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

Is Jeff Bridges the most underappreciated actor of his generation?

-- Christopher Kelly, Dallas Morning News

It's a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular culture staple for forever.

-- Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Cooper lets you experience Blake's gradual reawakening right along with him, and Bridges' superb performance -- not the slight plot -- carries the weight.

-- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

This show belongs to Bridges, who starts off as a magnificent train wreck and then takes a journey with the character.

-- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Jeff Bridges is terrific but the movie only ordinary.

-- Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

If ever a movie demonstrated how country music emerges from private sorrows, this is it. But something can always be done to make a movie better.

-- David Denby, New Yorker

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 5, 2010 D1