Crazy Heart Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A former star who’s been reduced to performing in front of meager crowds in sad venues, finds redemption through a much younger single mom and gets an opportunity to re-enter the spotlight.

This is the plot of “Crazy Heart”, the movie that will likely win Jeff Bridges his first (and overdue) Oscar. It also happens to be the same plot of “The Wrestler” and any number of movies in which a down-and-out loser gets redeemed by a pretty lady.

Bridges plays Bad Blake, a broken down and hard-living country music singer who travels from miniscule town to miniscule town to perform in bowling alleys when he’s not too busy throwing up in the garbage can out back.

Things start to change for him when he meets Jean (Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal), an aspiring writer interested in doing a feature on Bad, who ends up starting a tentative relationship with Blake, despite knowing that he’s very Bad news. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Around this time, Bad’s profile gets a boost thanks to Tommy Sweet, (Colin Farrell) his former protégé, who wants Bad to write some new material for him.

It’s kind of a shame that Farrell’s role is little more than an extended cameo, because he’s kind of excellent in his brief scenes (reminding me why he was considered to be such an exciting young actor not too long ago) and in his concert performance with Bridges (both actors did their own singing).

In fact, I found the relationship between Bad and Tommy more believable than the Bad/Jean romance.

I can’t really fault the acting.

Bridges (packing on some pounds and adopting the walk of a thoroughly defeated man) is terrific as Bad. Not only does he make for a credible former country star, but he makes for a credible scoundrel while remaining somewhat likable. The problem is that there’s very little in writer/director Scott Cooper’s script to make us like Bad and root for him. The reason we do so is because he’s played by Jeff Bridges. (So it was very smart to cast him.)

Cooper does even worse by Gyllenhaal.

The actress does all she can to try and make Maggie a credible human being, but Cooper has placed WAY too much on her plate to make her effective. As a writer, she’s there to get Bad to talk about his past, so she serves an expository function. She’s also (alternately) a fawning fangirl, a fiercely dedicated single mom, Bad’s love interest AND his biggest source of redemption and regret. I get that Cooper probably didn’t have a ton of money, but the movie needed more actors (or characters) to share that burden.

It’s too bad, because Gyllenhaal gives her most appealing performance since “Stranger than Fiction” and looks great. (Although the woman who said, “She’s so skinny” during a love scene would probably disagree.)

Still, Cooper’s biggest misfire was not giving us a peek into Bad’s process. I hate to keep comparing one movie to another, but what made “The Wrestler” so incredible was the detail Darren Aronofsky added to his movie about his character’s world. As a wrestling fan when I was younger, I ate that stuff up.

I’d be lying if I said I was a big country music fan, but I still would’ve liked to have seen Cooper explore that world a bit. He obviously DOES have an eye for detail (Bad’s early small-scale gigs are dead-on.) However, Bad’s apparent talent mostly remains a mystery. For example, when Bad writes the song (Oscar-nominated tune “The Weary Kind”) that’s poised to be his big comeback, we never see him working on it or what makes him such a gifted songwriter. Jean, literally, walks into a room to find Bad on her bad and he informs her that he’s done writing it.

Since we don’t get to see for ourselves what makes Bad such a brilliant artist, we have to rely on the music performed in the movie, overseen by producer T. Bone Burnett. Fortunately, those songs are fantastic.

“The Weary Kind” is good, but “Fallin’ & Flyin’” and “I Don’t Know” are even better, in my opinion. When I was sitting in the theatre, I could hear the person at the other end of my row tapping her feet, which made me realize I’d been tapping mine all along. They’re great because, as Bad says in the film, you feel like you’ve known them all along.

The movie is filled with solid little moments and VERY strong acting that ends up being slightly betrayed by an overly-simplistic screenplay.

Crazy Heart…B