CRAZY HEART – scott cooper – 2.5 / 10

Even before his celebrated turn in Crazy Heart, it was well established that Jeff Bridges was one of the best actors working today. He disappears so completely into every role that it seems as if he must, in real life, be exactly like the character he’s playing. When you watch The Big Lebowski, for instance, you believe that Bridges is exactly like The Dude, the aging hippie he plays in that film. Similarly, when you watch The Contender, you completely believe that he’s as thoughtful and confident in real life as the President he plays in that film is. Of course, since those characters are so different from each other, what that really means is that Bridges is just damn good. His work appears effortless. You can never catch him acting.

Bad Blake (the washed up country singer Bridges plays in Crazy Heart) is perhaps the best example yet of how extraordinary an actor Bridges is. But, and this is a really big ‘but,’ everything and everyone around him in the film is just awful. There isn’t one believable relationship or plot development in the entire thing. It’s a mess. And Bridges’s performance is wasted in it (though he might just get an Oscar out of it so good for him).

The story of Crazy Heart is one of those standard redemption arcs where the washed up, usually drug or gambling addicted (in this case, alcoholic) former star (of screen, sport or song) finds purpose (usually through the love of a good woman), recommits to his work and finds a creative resurgence. There seems to be one or two of these every year (The Wrestler was last year’s) and they’re as formulaic as any frothy romantic comedy or slasher flick. The only reason they get made at all is because they offer an actor a showcase part that’s designed to win awards.

However, even in the context of this most formulaic of movie genres, Crazy Heart is a disappointment. The redemption film is only as strong as its performances and its relationships. For this type of film to work at all, the performances have to make the audience care and the relationships between the characters have to be believable and worth rooting for. Unfortunately for Crazy Heart, Bridges’s is the only performance in the film worth anything and the relationships are completely and totally unbelievable. The central love story, in fact, is a little disturbing and borderline repulsive. This isn’t really the fault of Maggie Gyllenhaal (who plays Bridges’s love interest despite being twenty-eight years his junior) since she tries really really hard to get the audience to believe that her young, successful single mother would fall for someone as disgusting, filthy and worthless as Bad. This despite the fact that she’s only known him for a few hours and has a child she should be looking out for first and foremost. It’s the fault of the terrible, cliché-ridden script and whoever decided audiences wouldn’t be grossed out by watching an aging overweight drunk slobbering all over a young woman half his age. But make no mistake, the scenes of Bad and Gyllenhaal’s Jean making out are pretty hard to watch to say nothing of the very idea that a person like Jean (who’s supposed to be a smart reporter, remember) would let a person as self-destructive as Bad go anywhere near her young son.

But, okay, let’s assume you can get past the idea of seeing Jean and Bad together (which I really can’t). Let’s even assume that you can believe that these two completely different people with completely different lifestyles can fall in love after only a couple days together (which I really really can’t). Eventually the story’s going to reach the point (as these stories always do) where the character in search of redemption lets down the one person who cares about him and hits rock bottom. In this case, that moment comes when Jean leaves her son in Bad’s care for a few hours and he gets drunk and loses the kid. She, of course, freaks out, blames him and doesn’t speak to or see him again for a year and half.

How stupid is this woman? Bad is a screwed up mess who was bound to do something stupid. Is she really surprised when this comes to pass? And can she really blame him for it? She knew what a disaster this guy was when she invited him to come live at her house for a couple weeks. Bad being a self-centered screw-up should hardly surprise her. It’s her own damn fault,

And when she finally does talk to him over a year later, she reveals that she’s engaged to someone else. I suppose this is supposed to come across as brave and sad but it mostly just makes her look like even more of a moron. At this point in the story, Bad has been sober for sixteen months. His career is back on track. He’s even stopped smoking. If Jean loved the screwed-up, falling down drunk, slovenly mess version of Bad, how could she not love the cleaned-up, successful, healthy version? It makes no sense. And just like everything else in the film, it isn’t believable.

Perhaps the most unbelievable thing in the whole film is that Bad, after spending pretty much every day since he was fifteen drunk off his ass, gets sober with ease. He has no relapses and doesn’t appear to even want to drink or smoke. This is so profoundly false as to be jarring to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of addictive behavior. On top of that, by having Bad beat back his demons with such ease, it cheapens the whole film, making his struggle for redemption seem pretty damn easy and not worth all the time the film’s spent on them. It’s one final hollow note in a film full of them. And it marks Crazy Heart as just this year’s example of a film that’s one great performance and little else (like The Wrestler, The Last King of Scotland, Pollock, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, etc.). A few years from now no one will care about Crazy Heart except as the answer to the trivia question: for his role in what film did Jeff Bridges finally win an Oscar?