Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart may have the longest
establishing segment in film history, an introduction lasting for
most of the movie and consisting of repeated examples of the
dissolution of Jeff Bridges’s dissolute country singer, “Bad”
Blake — examples, therefore, of what makes him bad, as well as
Bad. No surprises here, of course. The “legendary” Bad’s
drinking, smoking, and wenching as he bumps along at the bottom
of the entertainment industry, playing bowling alleys and bars in
mid-sized Western towns, are the things that have made men bad
from time immemorial. Drug-taking, for some reason, is only
touched on for the briefest of moments and then consists of no
more than a puff of marijuana smoke. Bad, we are to understand,
is Classic Bad, rather than (as one might say) New Bad.
Now, of course, we know that “bad,” like Bad, is good. Or
at least not bad. And Crazy Heart is here to tell us,
like my favorite TV show, “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” that
good is not bad too — maybe even that good is good, though it is
still better, like Bad, to have been bad before becoming
— which by the end of the film Bad has — good. He has also,
significantly, reverted to his given name. It kind of makes you
tired to go over such familiar ground, which brings up both the
reason for the long establishment and the problem with the film
which is that, however momentous it is for the person in
recovery, addiction therapy is fundamentally pretty banal in the
watching. The appeal of “Dr. Drew” is that his addicts are people
whose names we know — so we feel that we are getting a private
look behind the scenes at life among the celebs — and that they
are quite likely to backslide. It’s like watching a NASCAR race
with the near certainty that somebody is going to crash.
I know this is a hard thing to say. Of course, we must feel
sorry for the fictional Bad’s pain and loss, just as we would for
a real person’s, and for the fact that his self-medication for
pain and loss has caused still more pain and loss, including that
of his most recent love-interest, who is played by the much
younger Maggie Gyllenhaal. She goes the way of his multiple
wives, just as her four-year-old son is lost to him in the same
way that his four-year-old son was lost to him, through
his own fault, 24 years before. Tough on Bad; tougher on the
kids, maybe. But Bad has got to be the center of attention even
though, in terms of cinematic artistry, it’s pretty hard to do
anything interesting with such materials. Miss Gyllenhaal’s
character, for instance, is a kind of groupie — the film has
already shown us what such a person looks like when she turns up
— who has one-night stands with washed up country singers. And
yet that’s, somehow, meant to be not pathetic? Wouldn’t there be
more to think about if we didn’t have to be focusing on poor Bad
all the time and, therefore, seeing her as just the perfect
mother to her four-year-old?
This is just one of the film’s false notes and suggests a
larger falseness in the whole set-up. It’s a cliché to say that
the addicted are the victims of their own “weakness,” but I have
always liked what Milton’s Samson has to say to the treacherous
Dalila when she makes a similar plea:
…if weakness may excuse,
What Murtherer, what Traytor, Parricide,
Incestuous, Sacrilegious, but may plead it?
All wickedness is weakness: that plea therefore
With God or Man will gain thee no remission.
The point is that weakness is just not very interesting as
a subject of a drama or a movie. It’s an excuse for something
else, rather than the thing itself, which is what we’re really
interested in — in this case Bad’s bent for self-destruction.
Getting over this weakness is correspondingly anti-climactic even
when it is overcome, as we would all wish it to be in real life,
through dutiful but unphotogenic striving.
When the movie finally gets around to telling a story that
is not, or not just, the familiar story of addiction, ruin, and
redemption, it is the equally familiar story of turning one’s
pain and loss into art — in the form of songs, ostensibly by Bad
Blake but actually by T-Bone Burnett, Ryan Bingham, and Stephen
Bruton, all quite persuasively performed by Mr. Bridges himself
— and of the rivalry between Bad and a former protégé (Colin
Farrell) who is now more successful. That these stories are all
pretty familiar is not the problem with the film. All stories
have been told before in one way or another. But there needs to
be something more original to make all this stuff come to life.
There the film comes up short, I find, which is why the best bits
of it are the musical numbers.
And here, I fear, I must sound a dissenting note on Jeff
Bridges, who has been universally praised for his portrayal of
“Bad” and is widely tipped to win this year’s Oscar for Best
Actor. It is that, to me, there is something annoyingly
postmodern in his performance. Bad is always, as it were, looking
at himself being bad, and that self-awareness is corrupting.
There are those who are bad out of sheer exuberance of spirit,
and that’s what this film wants you to think about Bad. But, fine
as he may be as an actor in other ways, Jeff Bridges can’t be
unself-conscious. He can’t be, as it were, naïvely and sincerely
bad, which is what his character needs to be in this picture to
make us believe in him. He’s much more himself and therefore
better and more interesting artistically as the Dude from
The Big Lebowski, a man who is bad on
purpose, almost in principle. To that extent, he stands above and
apart from Crazy Heart‘s improving and uplifting moral
lesson.
I hope I won’t be misunderstood as attempting to deny that
the lesson is improving and uplifting, but it must be
admitted that sobriety is a bit boring, in dramatic terms. In the
end, our hero has just returned to the place where ordinary,
decent, responsible people have remained all along. That’s great,
of course, but there is something that strikes another one of
those false notes, artistically speaking, about the fact that so
many people these days expect to be congratulated merely for
being ordinarily decent and responsible citizens — and in many
cases, like this one, after they have also been congratulated for
the authenticity of being non-decent and irresponsible in
culturally significant, “transgressive” ways. Mr. Bridges’s “Bad”
Blake can’t quite disguise the fact that he is coming forward,
grinning, to accept these awards — for genuine
grittiness, or gritty genuineness — in the first place, so that
in due course his creator may finally get his Oscar.
