‘Crazy Heart’ Loaded with Talent
Veteran film actor Jeff Bridges must have licked his lips when he read the script for “Crazy Heart.”
The film offers him up the saucy role of protagonist Bad Blake, a fallen country music legend who hop-scotches the Southwest to perform in small-town bars and guzzle down his anguish with shots of whiskey from plastic cups. Bridges’ voice finds the character’s charm with a ragged Southern twang, even as his bloodshot eyes and flat-heeled gait beg for oblivion.
It’s the lovable loser kind of role that Bridges has nailed before in such films as “The Big Lebowski” and “The Fisher King” but in “Crazy Heart” it’s writ large with the archetypal drive of song lyrics and Oscar chases. The role screams for a best actor award. Quite frankly it’s worthy of one.
But much has been made of Bridges’ performance, and not nearly enough of that of his co-star Maggie Gyllenhaal. She plays Jean, a reporter who manages to fall in love with Blake during a two-night stop in Santa Fe, despite their 20-odd year difference in age and the grotesquerie of Blake’s alcoholic sweats.
Their love affair is believable for Jean’s almost childlike crush on Blake and his musical gifts that she has nurtured for years from afar. But it’s also believable for Gyllenhaal’s restraint. One moment she gazes up at Bridges like a little girl. The next she tempers that gaze with the experience of past affairs gone awry.
Jean is a single mother with a four-year-old child and a lot to lose if Blake tanks out on her. In the performance of a lesser actress, the character could easily become too weepy and scared to believably engage the danger that Blake and his lifestyle represent, or else too bitchy and overprotective when Jean starts to hold back.
Gyllenhaal stands toe to toe with Bridges. She adds wisdom and intelligence to Jean’s reluctance to follow Blake on the road or to immediately accept his invitation to visit him at his home in Houston.
This hard edge has a softness, too, that allows Bridges to establish a warm chemistry with her. This chemistry, of quick and restrained passion, takes their characters towards a more mature relationship than is commonly seen in love films and to a conclusion that reflects satisfying growth in both characters.
Yes, Bridges’ performance makes “Crazy Heart” a very moving experience. But the strength of Gyllenhaal’s, paired with his, is what makes it memorable.
“Crazy Heart” merits three-and-a-half out of four stars.
photo: Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal in CRAZY HEART (Photo by Lorey Sebastian)
