Crazy Heart

We've seen it, or its very close relatives, dozens of times through the years, with Bruce Beresford's "Tender Mercies," probably the best example, but "Crazy Heart" is an entertaining, well-made movie, as comfortable as an old shirt and as familiar as an old friend, and featuring Jeff Bridges in an Oscar-contending role.

That doesn't make it a great movie. Its plot line is excruciatingly reminiscent of stories we've read, heard and seen -- talent is self-destructive (alcohol, drugs, sex, whatever) and our hero is on a direct path to Death and Damnation, but love of a Good Woman, and a Small Child, and a warning issued by a Greater Power, and help from an Old Friend, and Determination, and Gee Whiz, it's the closing credits rolling already.

And of course, what better background music than classic country from Waylon and Willie, and Townes Van Zandt and T Bone Burnett, with Burnett as music director.

In the end, like John Ford westerns and Busby Berkeley musicals, this is a classic-style, optimistic, everything-will-work-out-for-the-best American movie. Scott Cooper wrote and directed, simply and without apparent effort, but with all the details meshing together nicely to provide a feeling of real satisfaction. The film is based on a Thomas Cobb novel.

Bridges, 60, has been making good movies since he was a small boy, working with his older brother, Beau, and their father, Lloyd. His character, Bad Blake, is a generation past famous and only a step or two from being washed up, is drunk at night, hung over in the morning, now driving a battered pickup truck from one miserable gig to another across the American southwest. He eats in greasy diners, sleeps in run-down motels, usually with an aging groupie alongside. He plays in bowling alleys (a nod to "The Big Lebowski"?) with local bands, gulps medicine to keep his worn-out stomach more-or-less in line, but still skips out the back door to vomit into a trash can during too many numbers.

Enter Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), much younger and with much less baggage. An incipient journalist for a small-city paper, she interviews Blake, her father having interceded in her behalf. On a professional level, it really isn't a very good interview, but he's interested. In the movie's hokey spirit, he goes to her house to cook pancakes for her and her son, showing us that he still is looking for roots (for emphasis, he also has a house in Houston).

His drinking causes a major trauma with Gyllenhaal, pleasant enough in a role a hundred actresses could play, then helps cause an accident. An old friend, bartender and confidant, played with fine style by Robert Duvall, then gets involved.

And then Blake's surrogate son, super-star Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), rejoins his one-time mentor; their relationship has a fine, edgy quality. Another splendid relationship and some of the movie highlights, come between Bridges and Jame Keane, as his manager, with some lovely, profane conversations across a telephone line.

"Crazy Heart" is a movie that shows off American optimism. H. L. Mencken would have scorned it, but I found it enjoyable and relaxing, the latter because the story is so predictable that there's not a single scene in which to wonder what is coming next.

Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac.

-Joe

Comments

[Darryl vennard]

gee Whiz Joe, i think i want to see this movie for every reason you gave. As Bruce Springsteen sang"But there's one thing I know for sure girl:
I don't give a damn for the same old played out scenes." Unless they entertain me in a new way. And what the heck Mr Briges deserves this win

[Darryl vennard]

saw it loved it