A towering performance anchors one of our favorites of 2009.
There are plenty of great actors who know how to deliver an engaging to electrifying performance, but few fully inhabit their roles in a way that becomes so seamless you forget you’re watching a performance. Robert DeNiro pulled it off with Raging Bull, and last year Mickey Rourke accomplished that rare feat with The Wrestler.
This year, we’re fortunate to have another actor break into those hallowed ranks where fiction and reality completely become interchangeable. The actor is Jeff Bridges, and the role is that of Bad Blake, a washed-up alcoholic, womanizing country singer who seeks redemption in the new film Crazy Heart [check out our Q&A with the stars of the film].
Bridges has already garnered four Oscar nominations in his hallowed career but with Crazy Heart, he mines the emotional terrain of a man walking the line between middle-age and old age and comes up with gold. From his grubby beard and unkempt hair to his dusty clothes, beer gut and eyes that have settled into a stare of weary resignation from years of broken marriages (four, to be exact) and broken dreams.
Much like George Clooney’s character Ryan Bingham in the also-terrific Up in the Air, Bad Blake is a man who has a home but is more comfortable drifting from place to place, barely making a true connection with others. Only instead of Bingham’s world of first-class flights and accommodations, Bad Blake’s travels are made in a dusty, beat-up Suburban from the early ‘70s and his stops are a series of flea-bitten hotel rooms as he makes the endless circuit of small-town bowling alleys and bars, playing songs from decades before, when he was a major star.
Blake is too bleary to realize it, but he’s dying a slow death—first of the spirit, but eventually the body as well. Then one day in Santa Fe, where he’s playing a two-night stand, he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal, also award-worthy), a much-younger single mother and reporter who wants to interview him for the local paper.
From the moment she meets Blake, it’s obvious she finds what remains of his rugged charms. By the end of the weekend, they’ve become star-crossed lovers, bonding over their romantic disappointments, and this time Blake can’t just drop her like a bad memory. He starts coming back whenever he has a couple extra days between shows, forming his first real bond in ages, and hoping to make amends for his being a bad father in the past by helping her care for her four-year-old son. Yet there is an underlying tension, as Jean worries Blake’s drinking will come to haunt her and her child, and as Blake has to decide when if ever he’s ready to admit he’s hit bottom and get clean.
Blake is also forced to come to a career crossroads, having stopped writing his brilliant songs years ago. He has been soured by the fact his protégé Tommy Sweet (played by Colin Farrell in an appealing performance that reminds viewers of why he was once considered a potential star) has passed him by to become a superstar, but now their agent has called with big news: Sweet has realized the error of his ways in ignoring Blake, and wants to give him a second chance at the brass ring by having Blake open for him in front of 12,000 fans and by asking Blake to write him five new songs for a big pile of money.
Between these two choices lies a simple tale with great emotional complexity, one that recalls the now-underrated quiet 1983 gem Tender Mercies, which scored a Best Picture nomination for its own tale of a country singer searching for redemption. That movie earned Robert Duvall an Oscar, and Duvall is a part of Crazy Heart as well—not only playing Blake’s best friend Wayne, a bartender who’s a recovering alcoholic himself, but as one of the film’s executive producers alongside a group that includes roots-music icon T-Bone Burnett.
Crazy Heart is, quite stunningly, the first feature for writer-director Scott Cooper, an actor who was fortunate to have Duvall as his longtime mentor in the movie business. Cooper knows this world of forgotten back roads and wide-open vistas, of people torn between their once-happy dreams and now-sad realities. There is not a moment in this film that feels false, or lacking in appreciation for the heartland and the people who give it its heart.
