Friday Films: Crazy Heart

This week, I went to see “Crazy Heart,” which is pretty late in its run, but only came to East Stroudsburg about two weeks ago. It’s a really excellent movie, and Jeff Bridges is as great in it as they say he is. I feel like a lot has already been said about it, but I still want to toss some of my thoughts out there.

I was especially impressed with Jeff Bridges’ singing voice and his complete embodiment of the character. I guess you can make comparisons between Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and Jeff Bridges in this film—they’re both characters past their prime, weary from living too hard and trying to survive on their earlier success. But Mickey Rourke as “Randy the Ram” was (even though he was great in the role) still Mickey Rourke: he brought a lot of his own story into the character so much that you couldn’t see it just as a story about a wrestler. It was instead about the actor playing him, also out of chances, also weary, looking for a comeback. Jeff Bridges, though, took on the role of a broken old country singer so well that you kind of forgot he was Jeff Bridges; instead, he was this Kristofferson kind of character, trying to find one more hit song before slipping into obscurity.

Of course, the music is the highlight of the movie. The songs, particularly the Oscar-winning “The Weary Kind,” are more than just good songs from movies. They’re great songs. There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where Bad Blake is lying in bed, writing the song, and he asks Maggie Gyllenhal’s character if she knows that one. When she tells him she can’t remember who first sang it, he replies, “That’s how you know it’s a good one. It feels like you already know it.” It was a really interesting window into the songwriting process, which was kind of a theme that carried through the whole movie.

There’s a discussion early in the movie about who is “real country.” Bad Blake talks about his protégé, now a huge country star, and about how he has to try to hide it, “to compete with what’s coming out of Nashville.” Later on, the two men have a show together and Tommy Sweet, played by Colin Farrell, is living the life of one of those overblown country stars, with three tour buses and a big-shot tour manager and a full staff. The song “Hank Didn’t Do it Like This” is playing as Bad Blake pulls in next to the buses and walks backstage, and I think it would have been really easy at this point for the movie to make Tommy Sweet into a parody, a punching bag for all of the Brad Paisleys currently making millions of dollars, but they didn’t, and I think that ended up being much more powerful. Instead, he was this minor character trying to navigate superstardom without abandoning his roots, and it made him really sympathetic. He’s also the character who gives Bad Blake a chance to write new material, to break out of playing the same old songs over and over.

It’s not a perfect movie—it feels a little long at parts, and the montage of Bad Blake trying to get himself together seemed a little too familiar—but on the whole, it's worth seeing. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to "Tender Mercies," a Robert Duvall movie about a touring country singer, which I haven’t seen yet. I think the producers of the movie wanted to pay tribute to where their movie came from: Duvall has a small part in the movie, as Bad Blake’s friend and bartender, a man who seems to have gone through this before. Like the country singers in the film, they acknowledge their roots while moving forward, and this struck me as a really admirable way to make a movie.