Crazy Heart: Impassioned Performances Save Plot

By Nate Storey

When the lights dimmed for the showing of Crazy Heart I attended, I noticed that I was the youngest person in the theatre on a Friday night by about 30 years.  Normally, a story that starts this way would only go downhill from there.  But Crazy Heart defied the trepidation that had set in because of the audience and a few questionable previews preceding the movie (Letters to John followed by Letters to God).

By now, just about everyone knows that Jeff Bridges won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in this movie.  And boy does he deserve it.  The movie is not always new or surprising, in fact, it is often predictable.  But Bridges’ performance, as well as those of the other cast members, brings the film to a whole different level.  Bridges fits perfectly into his role as Bad Blake, an alcoholic, down on his luck ex-country music star who is trying to stay afloat on the meager gigs he can get, including bowling alleys and tiny bars.  Unsurprisingly, he meets Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, Jean Craddock, a reporter for a small city newspaper, with whom he begins a romantic relationship, as well as a friendship with her son, Buddy.

Their relationship is about as predictable as they get; the foreseeable issue of Blake’s alcoholism causing problems and trust issues along the way. But Bridges manages to bring a likability to a man who is more or less unsympathetic in his actions and treatment of others—he takes Buddy to a bar one day and loses the kid while drinking, and early in the film gets too drunk to perform a song he promised to dedicate to an audience member.  The acting is so genuine that the audience is able to forgive any predictability in the plot.

Besides the acting, the music is the other saving grace of the film.  Normally, I’m not a fan of country music.  Listening to Kenny Chesney and the like every morning on the bus to school tends to ruin such things (though I’d argue, as would Bad Blake, that there wasn’t much hope for “fake” country anyway).  The film gains a lot of ground by using music performed by Jeff Bridges, who has considerable actual musical talent.  T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham wrote the songs performed in the movie, most notably the final song in the film “The Weary Kind,” which won the two an Oscar, and is actually performed in the movie by Bingham (though Colin Farrell lip-syncs it).  The song is spot on (perhaps a touch too on-the-nose), beautiful, and heart-felt.

Since viewing the movie, I read that if Bridges had agreed to the role of Bad Blake, Steve Martin was the director’s second choice and he would have rewrote the film to have more of a Lost in Translation vibe.  This feeling is already visible in the film, as the film is slow-paced and quiet.  The focus of the film is not the action or the plot, but the performances and the feeling of the piece.  In highlighting these performances, director Scott Cooper and the entire team behind Crazy Heart have succeeded unquestionably.