Every few years there's a movie that comes out with an actor in the autumn if his career that critics and Hollywood folks go nuts about because it is some sort of magnum opus, encapsulating his whole life and career and showing that old people are talented too. (The really sick thing is that this situation almost always happens with men and not women - I guess because actresses can't get much good work past 60. Sad.)
Twenty-some years ago, it was Paul Newman in The Color of Money (a highly underrated film that deserved more awards and acclaim than just the attention it got for Newman). A few years ago, everyone was talking about Frank Langella's performance in Starting Out in the Evening (meh - overall a very bad imitation of Philip Roth). Last year, of course, everyone was buzzing about Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (I am not a big fan - I think his performance is ok - but the film totally blows).
This year, the movie *everybody's talking about* is Crazy Heart and Jeff Bridges' *wonderful, amazing, fantastic* performance. I think the film is a big snoozer and though Bridges is good in the role, he is not better than good and all the praise is probably due to the easy story it is for lazy editors to assign than for anything he gives onscreen.
Bridges plays Bad Blake, a drunk, hard-living 50-something country music has-been. He's a musician's musician who has written some fantastic songs in his career - some of them made more famous when sung by other stars. When we meet him, he's on the road in the Southwest on a bar tour through all the back-woods one-horse towns his agent can book him into.
When he gets to Santa Fe, the bar owner asks him if he would do an interview with his niece, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Bad agrees and meets her in his motel room. He's drunk and sticks of cigarettes, but for some reason she likes his roughness. The two fall into a brief love affair. He continues to live hard - hopefully not around her young son - and she continues to look blindly at his clear faults. The movie goes on in predictable ways as a typical 'one-last-shot-omigod-can-the-old-fogey-turn-his-life-around' story.
My main problem with the film is the script, which fluctuates between totally unrealistic and complete Hollywood cliche. It is never clear why Jean falls in love with Bad. He's sweet, for sure, but he's disgusting. There is no reason to think that she's so down-on-her-luck that she would go for such a man - and that she has a son and tells us all the time that she doesn't want to make more mistakes with her personal life, it seems like a bit much that she would let her guard down in such an extreme way. (Honestly, the thought of Gyllenhaal and Bridges having naked sex is stomach-turning to me.)
The dialogue is really terrible and the story is ridiculous. Writer/Director Scott Cooper adapted the script from a book by Tomas Cobb (that's supposed to be pretty good, though I have not read it). At one point toward the end of the film, there is a scene that you feel coming from a mile away, but you hope won't happen because you've seen it about 150 times before in other movies - but it does happen. Ugh! It's just plain lazy and dumb. Are we really at a point when writers, directors and audiences are so immune to miserable banality that we eat it up and ask for more? It seems like much of what happens would lead to a failing grade in a screenwriting class (no comment on the Independent Spirit Award's nomination for Cooper's script)
The acting throughout is good. Bridges is good - but I'm not sure he does all that much. He looks exactly like Kris Kristofferson (interestingly, Kristofferson is also a very talented songwriter whose songs are also better known than he is) and drinks whisky and chain smokes - but we don't get a lot of range in his performance. Gyllenhaal is also good, though again she doesn't do all that much with the part. Colin Farrell is good as Bad's more handsome, more successful protege - and if that's his real voice singing, he should switch to country music, because it's great!
The music throughout the film is wonderful - much better than the movie itself. T-Bone Burnett does a fabulous job with the songs that feel like old classics, even though we've never heard them before. I would buy a Bad Blake album, if only the guy really existed. I would have much preferred a movie-long concert instead of a dumb movie that I had seen before. I don't know why Burnett is not getting more credit for his songs here - he deserves basically all the positive attention for the film.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
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