Crazy Heart [Blu-ray]

Jeff Bridges plays 'Bad' Blake, a 57-year old chain-smoking, alocholic, washed-up country music star. He is effusive and rarely cares about anything apart from where his next drink is coming from and bounces from bar to bar playing small-time gigs and the same old songs to make ends meet. When Blake meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) a small-town reporter who wants to write a piece on Blake, he re-evaluates his priorites and the road he is choosing to walk.

Running out of options, Blake is forced to play support for his former protege, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farell) whom he mentored and taught 'country' to, at the expense of his pride and self-respect. Tommy asks him to write some new material for him and Blake sees a way out of his self-destructive spiral and a way to be with Jean. Will he save himself from the brink?

Crazy Heart is probably Bridges' best performance to date (and I love Jeff Bridges), he plays 'Bad' so well, with great comedic effect and his flippant attitude just seems so natural. You can't help but feel sorry for him as he tears himself apart and I genuinely felt for the character. Colin Farrell was a really welcome surprise, I knew he was in the film, but going by past performances I wasn't expecting too much from him. I was pleasantly taken aback as he played Tommy Sweet in a practically note-perfect manner, suiting the character's idioms and really filling out the acrimonious past between Sweet and Blake. Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance is solid and believable as the reporter/single-mother but somehow it doesn't bring any empathy for her character. Despite this, the film really makes you feel for Bad Blake and honestly will him to turn things around.

The film is beautifully shot, credit to Scott Cooper here, it features a lot of bars and southern, rustic locations yet doesn't feel bland or homogenous. The score is good as well, I'm not a huge country-western fan, yet found myself whistling one or two of the tunes well after the film; I'm told most of the tracks are written by T-bone Burnett, but sung by Bridges. All in all, this is a touching film about last-chance turn arounds. Critics may argue that it is 'the wrestler' but about a country music star and they wouldn't be far wrong; but Bridges brings a unique level of humanity and vulnerability to the role. On top of all this Robert Duvall has a small part as a brilliant bartender. Highly recommended!!

As every film lover knows, Jeff Bridges has been putting in great performances for years - but "Crazy Heart" is different. Quietly magnificent throughout the entire movie, he owns the Oscar on this one.

"Bad Blake" is a 57-year old country singer, drunk most of the time and shuffling with a cigarette in his gob towards another small time venue he doesn't care about. As he empties a plastic carton of piss into the parking lot of a bowling alley (having been on the road for hours), he can think about only one thing - not family, not music, not love - but how can he get a bottle of McClure's Whiskey into his liver with only $10 left in his jeans?

Without any new material to make money from, wifeless for the 4th time and with deteriorating health, "Bad" is still a legend among his fans and when he's on stage, him and his beloved songs like "I Don't Know" can still cut it. But the younger bucks have replaced him - especially his despised protégé Tommy Sweet (a brilliantly cast Colin Farrell) who now has 3 huge articulated trucks to haul his equipment from one arena to the next and not a beat-up convertible called 'Bessie'.

Then "Bad" gets a lucky break. He is interviewed by a local Santa Fe journalist Jean Craddock, a divorced Mum in her Thirties with a bubbly 4-year old son Buddy whom she protects from - you guessed it - 'bad' men. Yet despite all her rules, both Jean and Buddy fall for the charms of the big kid with the guitar and the ten-gallon hat. And on the story goes, heartbreak to joy, joy to heartbreak and back again...

The support cast are convincingly enamored small town folks - Tom Bower as the store manager and Rick Dial as the local band's piano player. Colin Farrell sings amazingly well too and is a perfect foil for the aging singer (he's also superb in "Ondine"). Significant others shimmy around Bad's constant verbal abuse too - Paul Herman as his long-suffering manager Jack Greene and Robert Duvall as the bar-owner who never seems to give up on "Bad" and is maybe his only real friend (Duvall is still such a great actor at 79).

Although this kind of movie harks back to Duvall's own "Tender Mercies", it feels a lot richer in its details. There's a particularly tough scene where Bad decides to finally call his only son of 28. Bad hasn't seen him since he was 4 years of age - never helped him, never been there for him. There are very few words in the scene, but there's a lot of pain. The grown-up son is not surprisingly unforgiving - especially with his Mom having passed away two years earlier. With the receiver to his ear, there is a look on Bridge's face that is pure destruction - a horrible realization that he has caused agony with his cavalier stay-away life and won't easily get forgiveness for it. In the hands of another actor, there might have been histrionic tears when the call abruptly finishes - but Bridges just does what an alcoholic would do - not mend his ways, but look cravenly at the kitchen for a bottle to get lost in. And on it goes until he finally does something really selfish and stupid in a shopping mall with a boy who now looks at him with affection. It's brilliantly realized stuff, it really is.

Niggles - his recovery is too swift and too painless - alcohol abuse over that length of time is never that easy to shake off, and even though Maggie Gyllenhaal is a magnificent actress, there's a nagging disbelief in the relationship between her character and his - would she really fall for such a car-crash as "Bad Blake". But these are minor points.

"Crazy Heart" (based on the novel by Thomas Cobb) isn't quiet a masterpiece, but it's damn close. And while the other actors, the T-Bone Burnette music and Scott Cooper's superb direction all add so much to the film - ultimately it belongs to its leading man. Bridges imbibes it with believability and a soul few actors could even get near.

As Jean asks what is it that makes a great song - Bad answers with the title of this review - "The good ones feel like they've always been there..." You may feel the same about "Crazy Heart".

Put it high on your rental/to buy list.

At long last, after several nominations, the great Jeff Bridges - one of the very few contemporary film actors who can hold a candle to Mitchum, Lancaster and Cooper and the other `real men` of a past era - got his Oscar. But it could have been for any of at least a half dozen films before this one, such as The Big Lebowski (the Dude abides indeed!) or The Fabulous Baker Boys.
Crazy Heart, about an old time grizzled, alcoholic, but damn good country singer, isn`t a great film ,but it`s a good one, and it`s a delight to watch not only Jeff at his most commanding, but also the impishly likeable Maggie Gyllenhaal, a single mother with a little boy, Buddy, that he runs into on the road and romances. The two of them are fine together, each seeming to lock into each other`s rhythms.
It`s a film with plenty of space in it, in both senses of the word. These are people of usually few words, and this is reflected in the scenes on the road, where you can see the America that inspires some of the songs Bad, and other such country artists, sings.
Bridges drawls a lot of his dialogue (and drunken monologues too, alone in one motel room after another) but when it comes to singing, he`s note perfect. This is one actor who really can cut it. Bridges has been singing and plucking a guitar for years, so it was a matter of time before someone put those talents to good use. He doesn`t disappoint, but he also has the requisite gravitas (he was 60 when he made this) to look, sound, and impress as an elder statesman of country music.
Maggie G is delightful as the woman he falls for, and Colin Farrell has an (uncredited - why?) part as a younger, less weighty singer who used to sing with Bad Blake. He`s excellent, but I wish they`d managed to cajole a real country singer to play the part - one of the slick Nashville upstarts who infest country music these days. I`m sure enough of a fee would have enticed one of them.
Robert Duvall has a cameo as a bartending old buddy of Blake`s, but he looks like he`s strayed in from another film (his own Oscar-winning Tender Mercies, maybe, about an ageing country singer?) and is oddly ineffectual, as if, as a co-producer, he wanted to be in the film somehow but couldn`t quite work out how or why. Still, Duvall is always worth watching, and it`s good to see him with Jeff, two not so very different actors sparring together.
The feel for the ambience of motels, bad food eaten on the hop, ad hoc venues, and the life of an almost past-it singer on the road, is well caught by director Scott Cooper, and the music - well, the music is just great!
How does it all come out in the end? I leave that for you to find out, in your own bitter-sweet way.