Crazy Heart
A middle-aged, weathered performer who’s down on his luck, strapped for cash, and reaching for the bottle. Haven’t we seen this before? We have. This film wishes it was The Wrestler from 2008. It can’t be The Wrestler for one very simple reason: it tries way too hard to please everybody. Nothing is that hard to handle, it pulls punches throughout, and each ache is quickly bandaged with laughter or sentimentality. Cooper puts together a pretty decent film, with good writing and straightforward cinematography. Ultimately, though, it’s Jeff Bridges’s performance and several doses of feel-good country music that make this film a mass-market win.
Bad Blake (Bridges) is a country musician who has run his course, riding in on fumes from a career that ended a decade earlier. He drinks like a fish, and his shows suffer for it. While on his armpit of America tour, he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a single mother who quickly shows she’s more than just another tour junkie looking to get laid. They are smitten, and a romance separated by tour miles and a generation gap buds and attempts to bloom. Following a few missteps, Blake comes face to face with questions he must answer if he wants to live a meaningful life.
Bridges is very good, in touch with his character in a way we have come to expect from silver screen vets. His Blake is everything we expect him to be. He is certainly believable, and he reveals the pathos that has been welling in Blake’s soul for years, but, though it may be one of Bridges’s best and one of the year’s best, if we’re honest, it probably isn’t the best performance that we have seen this year.
Bridges is complemented well by Gyllenhaal, who seems to be channelling Renée Zellweger, circa 1996. However, the floodgates are opened in almost every scene, causing her to lose emotional honesty and the audience to care less about her than we might have had she shown some restraint, some personal character, an attempt to quell the tears which gnaw at her eyes, begging to be set free. Instead, we are coerced into caring, a current running rampant through much of this film.
The music is mostly kitschy, the writing fine but incredibly safe, and the whole story a bit too easy to come by. Cooper’s directorial debut shows much promise, but he needs to find a voice detached from the crowd, something we haven’t seen, or, perhaps more importantly at times, something we don’t want to see. The Wrestler was able to pull this off with dignity and candor. Then again, we are comparing Darren Aronofsky with a first-timer. At least a pinch of lenience is due.
All in all, much could probably be forgiven in this one if the credits had rolled about ten minutes earlier than they do, when we see Blake alone, guitar in hand, singing to himself the song that resulted from his life-changing experiences. Instead, the film rolls on, and everything is wrapped up nicely – with a sunset to boot. Cooper needs to remove the gimmicks and just tell the story. Because he doesn’t do that here, Crazy Heart is ultimately just one more above-average feel-good film that could have been so much more.
Rating: 3/4 Stars
