Film: Crazy Heart

(Sometimes I spoil things. If you'd rather not know, stop reading already)

We watched Crazy Heart last night and I found it to be quite touching. It is, at heart a knowledge film: a grizzled old fella learns how to live again. For this film living means being open to authentic feelings of love, connection, parenting and song writing. Jeff Bridges is doing a variation on The Dude from Lebowski and there are lots of callbacks to that film: the opening shot is at a bowling alley, he fishes his glasses out from a garbage can, he constantly has a double of whiskey in hand.

The film also has a strong theme of aging within it. Bad Blake (Bridges) has a protege Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) who has usurped him and found more fame than Blake ever did. While Blake is tooling around backroads playing in bars and bowling alleys, Sweet is playing arenas. The scenes between Sweet and Blake are kind -- the men don't really hate each other, but Blake is hurt by the fame that Sweet has achieved thanks to Blake's mentoring. Sweet admits that he needs new material and asks if Blake would write him some songs, reinforcing the understanding that Blake is now second fiddle to his former protege and really fucking around with Blake's head. Blake just can't accept that he is getting older and that he needs to change -- give up drinking, smoking, and start losing weight.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a reporter who comes to fall in love with Blake, and Blake clearly loves her and her little boy. But he's still a chain-smoking drunk with a smoldering resentment at the way fame has by-passed him. The romantic storyline was done well, I thought. It's the kind of romance that never has the timing right, where one person is too far ahead or behind the other for there to be a real relationship. But when Blake is looking after her son, Buddy, for an afternoon, he loses him. Fair enough -- that can happen to parents. Except that Blake was drunk and drinking in a bar when Buddy wondered off. And that is the point where Blake realizes that he needs to get sober.

So then he gets sober and writes the best songs of his life and becomes a better person. I felt like the ending was a little rushed and totally sidestepped the trouble of a newly sober person who has to re-engage with the world and the fact that people around him will continue to drink.

But I have to say that Bridges did an amazing job and definitely deserved the Oscar he won. It was fantastic to hear him sing the songs and to see The Dude, Country Singer Version, resurface.