Crazy Heart

By AM Tuesday, February 1, 2011

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‘I used to be somebody, but now I am somebody else’ - Bad Blake

Jeff Bridges is a brilliant actor. Until my wife introduced me to his screen performances I had never rated him and had the tendency to avoid movies with him in it. He came across as pedestrian. Now having watched a few of his on screen accomplishments, there is no movie featuring him that I would turn my nose up at. In Crazy Heart, which we viewed a few nights ago, he played Bad Blake, an alcohol addicted Country and Western star who broke the law on DWI each time he got into his car to make the journey between venues. He was his own roadie and his trailer was his jeep. So the venues were not packed auditoriums but darkened barrooms and bowling allies.

Anyone familiar with Micky Rourke in Barfly will instantly identify with Crazy Heart. Bad Blake lives in an alcoholic haze which is not lifted even when he looks at the post-make up faces of some of those he wakes up beside the morning after a show. He is 57 and does the circuit picking up bit money, his legendary song writing prowess – his once real financial pulling power - rendered impotent by a whiskey addled brain. While little blue pills might put some firmness into other areas of his life there is no equivalent for tackling song writing dysfunction.

Four times married, five if Maggie Gyllenhaal who effortlessly plays Jean, a journalist who comes to interview him, is right, evidently Bad Blake is not a man who holds things together very well. Jean, who wants to profile him in the paper that employs her, knocks on the door of his hotel room where he is cooped up drunk, almost naked, watching porn, while trying to eat what looks like a tray of prison food. From that moment on it is pretty much a done deal – their lives are going to intertwine. Not a healthy option for a working single mother who has a four year old son in whose presence she forbids alcohol consumption. But forget any notions of a sensually appealing film. Bad Blake and eroticism are mutually repellent. As the film and book blogger Sheila O’Malley writes, you can smell him from the television. She conjures an image of a porous screen through which alcohol just oozes, invading the nostrils. The sensual dimension of the film, to the degree that it is preserved at all, is solely the accomplishment of Jean.

Bad trudges through what remains of his career being resentful of the iconic Tommy Sweet, played by Colin Farrell, whom he regards as the protégé who stole all the plaudits. To the hoards of C & W fans Tommy Sweet is sweet Tommy whereas Bad is just sour and stale, tolerated for past performances rather than lauded for anything new he might produce, which he invariably doesn’t. Pride jars with financial self interest. He needs the money but doesn’t want to open for Tommy in front of an audience of 12 000. In his resentful state of mind he calculates that Tommy should be opening for him while knowing it can’t happen.

In red neck country where bible bashing is an even greater fixation than Country & Western music, Bad Blake is on the road not to salvation but oblivion. A doctor tells him to quit drinking and smoking and to lose 25 lbs or go under the sod. It falls on deaf ears. Taking responsibility for himself does not enter the equation but when placed in charge of Jean’s four year old son, who he has been told not to drink around – instructions he ignores – the realisation that the world is not his plaything and that it has to be shared with others begins to take hold.

Too late, maybe; but there is a willingness there to salvage something if not all he might have hoped for. The drink is his demon and his battle with it is absorbing viewing. The glass of bourbon I sat down to watch Crazy Heart with was only half finished when the curtain fell.