Paul Kleyman
RedwoodAge.com
Oscar is buzzing for Crazy Heart, a well-acted Hollywood weepy gritting up the nation’s screens with a heart of golden redemption under the
gristle of the country music scene.
Four-time Oscar nominee Jeff Bridges (read: probable insiders’ favorite this time) and Robert Duvall play gray and bald eagles, elders of the C&W tribe, who can only be lovable 100 feet away and 30 feet tall. The script isn't bad, the direction by Scott Cooper is okay and the music is better than both.
This film, however, is largely an overrated rehash of every Hollywood country music drama you've ever seen. Bridges is getting this week's Oscar
buzz. If he gets nominated and wins, the film still will fall short of Duvall's 1983 Academy Award-winning turn in
Tender Mercies, a deeper and more finely scripted film.
The film falls well short of paying true homage to the lessons of wisdom and experience. For that tell Netflix you want to see last year’s brilliant film
The Visitor, which earned character actor Richard Jenkins a 2009 nomination.
Bridges, in classic Hollywood hackneyed form hooks, up with fresh young thing, played by 32-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her ingénue role, also potentially
Oscar-worthy, does not bat its eyes coyly under after the film depicts Bridges as the aging Bad Blake as a man so mired in his own effluent that the best he can hope for is a female barfly of a certainly repulsive age.
For all of the film’s merits in music and performance, Hollywood and its reviewers seem happy to overlook the imbedded ageism and sexism in the concept. And maybe country-ism, too, if the premise is that these are the simple-minded southerners mired in whisky-soaked traditions that denigrate certain people.
Bad Blake is depicted in the early reel as a been-down-so-long-looks-like-up-to-me faded country star now relegated to singing in bowling alleys (a Bridge specialty, apparently,
as fellow Big Lebowski fans will note), and getting so drunk he'll sleep with any painted hag hovering in the tobacco smoke.
Bowling Them Over
In the early scenes, Bad sings over the 10 pins, as the camera pans across the older woman's face several times, in case viewers lack the subtlety of a neat slug of rye. The next shot is of the sag-faced floozy snoozing in the sunlit motel room as the camera pulls up to show Bad
- to audible gasps from the audience at my screening - disapproving of how low he's sunk.
Bad is propositioned by a more attractive 40-something groupie in another town. By that time, though, age-appropriateness is screwed back in its bottle; Bad meets Jean, the budding music journalist, and is smitten. I'm surprised there wasn't a product placement for
antiaging cream.
This movie is bound to be a hit, and I'd definitely recommend the original sound track with hopes that Bridges gets a hit out of film’s companion CD.
His voice and delivery reminded me as much of Leonard Cohen as, say, Waylon Jennings or another C&W staple.
The cinematography is top Hollywood: Interiors saturated with saloon din contrast with western-sky panoramas that dwarf our puny, hill-of-beans world of troubles.
Pondering the Beyond
One of the more memorable shots in the film is a lazy rise over a lake, where Bridges and Duvall sit quietly fishing and philosophizing. The camera quietly pulls up and out, leaving the pair painted in a lower corner of the screen and viewers wondering at a sad man's bad choices in the peaceable kingdom he can’t yet see. Thump yourself a bible;
it's a stunning, if pointed image.
All in all, though, this is one more case of older guy meets younger gal. Guy wins gal and her little boy
(And this kid, Jack Nation, does steal you goofy heart), guy gets drunk, loses gal, guy meets AA.
In Hollywood's idea of a contemporary country twist of lemon, things get predictably unpredictable toward the end. Let's just say that, when it comes age in our fast-aging society, guy gets a little wiser but Hollywood comes off as no more mature than ever.
My advice: Take or leave the flick, but dial up the CD selections on iTunes.
