Crazy Heart

How often can it be said?  Jeff Bridges is the most unde rated actor alive today.  A man who has been working in earnest since 1958, born into a show business family and owner of such beloved characters as the Dude.  It seems like every decent movie of the last twenty years features Bridges somewhere or another, he is the baby-boomers' Robert Mitchum.

So, what about Bridges' most serious effort to date, Crazy Heart.  Unlike many of the other works that Bridges has appeared in since 1990, Crazy Heart is a little more adult, a little more sophisticated, and yet the story is not unfamiliar or overly complicated.


Bad Blake is a country and western singer -- more along the bluesy hard drinking side of the genre as opposed to the white-washed Jesus-cleaned side.  He drives himself around the southwest in a pick up truck playing bowling alley's and dive bars.  His agent is also agent to Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a singer that is infinitely more successful than Blake but who owes his career and the bulk of his song catalog to the old man. Blake is an alcoholic, an estranged father, an ex-husband four times over, and has just fallen in love with Jeanne Craddock (Maggie Gylenhall) and her four year-old son Buddy (the fabulously cute Jack Nation).

And then, there's whiskey -- the other major character of the film.  Blake drinks whiskey like fish swim in shark-infested waters.  He doesn't consider its effects on his health or his relationships.  Well, maybe he does, we sense that he feels too old to do anything about it.  And while the film doesn't seem to make a big deal about his alcoholism, in the same way that no one deals with a family member's alcoholism when it doesn't seem to be effecting anyone else, a car accident brings Blake into a hospital perhaps for the first time in decades and a doctor actually sits down and tells Blake about the sad physical shape that he's in.

The story of Bad Blake is a story of redemption: spiritual, emotional, physical.  A man who has, for so many years, tried to stay somehow relevant by stubbornly refusing to change realizes that all he needs to do is think clearly and see the world and his relationships for how they are and how they relate to him.  When we're stuck in a rut, our first instinct is to keep the truck in gear and lurch out of the rut.  But sometimes, one needs to get out of the rut by changing one's actions. 

Gyllenhaall does her best as an unconventional love interest, so the February-November relationship between her character and Bad Blake is not as off-putting as it might be with a different actress that was born after Jeff Bridges in King Kong was released.  Robert Duvall shows up as Blake's best friend and bartender.  And someone taught Colin Farrell how to do a Texas accent.  The cast is fabulous and what the narrative lacks in direction or even, dare I say, interest it more than makes up for it with its ensemble and Jeff Bridges wonderful guitar work and singing.

On a side note, this was my wife's and my date night for the month.  I was very satisfied with the trip to Berkeley to see this and to eat at a fabulous little Japanese restaurant called Norikonoko.  I had ramen & pork with gyoza, S.Y. had blackened cod with miso soup and a bevy of little sides.  We saw the film at Landmark's California Theater on Kittredge and I was fully impressed.  I think that it used to be one of those places with a balcony that showed only one movie, and perhaps worked in a midnight Rocky Horror every other Saturday, but has since installed two more theaters in its balcony.  It was totally old-fashioned and wonderful, with the little aluminum chairs and a disinterested concession guy that doesn't try to upsell the popcorn (No, i don't want the fucking large -- oh its only a buck more and it has free refills?  Oh all right).

The theater manager (or maybe owner, is Landmark franchised?) came out before the movie to give us a little wassup and tell us about future releases.  I <3 Landmark Theaters, they remind me of college.  In fact, the only thing that annoys me a little about Landmark Theaters (and I have to say that I was guilty of this in my greener years) is that throughout the movie whenever a piece of dialogue sounds the least bit philosophical or ironic, one can hear stifled little pretentious giggles or hmph's throughout the audience.

But, what can you do?  Its independent film.