First let’s take Bad’s inventory. According to the onscreen evidence in “Crazy Heart,” Bad Blake is a 57-year-old, self-taught, honky-tonk country singer with hemorrhoids. He hasn’t written a song in three years. His career is mostly criss-crossing the juke joints and bowling alleys of the American southwest. He’s gone through four marriages, doesn’t know his 28-year-old son, has no desire to rehearse with the pickup bands waiting for him at his one-nighters, and finds only fleeting interest in sharing his motel room with women who are carrying a lot of past and not much future. Bad’s also a chain smoker with a daily habit of a fifth (or more) of McClure’s bourbon — by the bottle, in a tin flask, or on the rocks at places where most proprietors no longer let him run a tab.
Although Bad’ll lift a PBR if it’s offered, he’s essentially a lifelong whiskey/ rocks drinker. He still takes pride that he’s never missed a performance, even though in the middle of a song he may have to bolt off the stage to throw up in a trash can. Still, he knows exactly what he wants to hear in a soundcheck, and he’s held onto a following, mostly older couples who know his songs and swoon when he jumps down off the bandstand to twirl some woman around. They know he’s the real deal, a maverick who’s leading that genuine, hard-travelin’ outlaw life. One liquor dealer who has a McClure’s display set up in his honor even gives Bad the fifth he’s come in to buy. (The dealer, in one of this movie’s few misjudgments, tells Bad that his name is Bill Wilson. It’s a sly wink at the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and one that may not be appreciated by people in recovery.)
As the plot develops, the young niece of a piano player in Sante Fe comes to interview Bad for the local paper. She’s also a single, protective mom with a 4-year-old button-cute son named Buddy. With her modest bare shoulders, Oklahoma roots, and a willingness to sip a little McClure’s neat, she’s a natural for this old bear to move on, and before long she’s sharing her bed with him because he whips up authentic breakfast biscuits for Buddy before he starts his day’s drinking. Even after Bad falls asleep at the wheel and nearly wrecks his vehicle, and even when the hospital doc tells him he’s an alkie and better stop drinking and smoking (and lose 25 pounds), she sticks by him. The one absolute rule is “Don’t drink in front of Buddy.” So of course Bad takes Buddy to a bar in the mall and loses him while digging up $12.50 for a ginger ale and a double McClure’s. Buddy turns up, but the ray of hope for Bad goes dark as the woman and child leave him to hit low bottom alone. Bad throws up, plays tile-face on the bathroom floor and passes out hugging the bottle.
The man who 12th-steps him into recovery is a bartender. At first he appears to be a drinker because he pours shots for both of them and they click glasses, though we don’t see the bartender actually imbibe. He takes Bad out for a day’s fishing and eventually to a bucolic, woodsy rehab where Bad joins a traditional AA circle, introducing himself as an alcoholic and admitting he drank away most of his life. He works the coffee pot, he communes with nature, he gets better — this all happens in about one minute of screen time. The bartender drives him home, telling him he’s been there himself, and now “It’s one day at a time.” Little by little, Bad begins performing sober under the watchful eye of the bartender. Later Bad goes to see Buddy and her mom, but she’s not taking him back, no way, not then, not ever. Sixteen months pass—Bad’s playing larger concert venues and she shows up to interview him again, this time wearing a diamond engagement ring from another man. She tells Bad her new man is a good man, and Bad replies that she deserves one. They look at each other. She says to Bad that he’s doing great. “One day at a time,” he murmurs. The end.
Jeff Bridges does alcoholic oblivion and sober humility so well that he won a Best Actor Oscar, in the rich tradition of past winners who’ve played alcoholics, including (but by no means limited to) Nicholas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Robert Duvall in “Tender Mercies” and Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend.” The list piles up with Supporting Actor Oscar winners like James Coburn in “Affliction” and Claire Trevor in “Key Largo.” In 2010, Jeff Bridges, along with Tilda Swinton in “Julia,” set the standard for alcoholic portrayals in the new century.
Thus both Bridges and his strong supports in “Crazy Heart” — Maggie Gyllenhaal as his for-a-while girlfriend and Robert Duvall as his sponsor— take on huge importance as contemporary culture markers. Duvall, also one of the film’s producers, has additional past solid credits playing drunks in “The Great Santini” and “The Apostle.” Gyllenhaal is sensitive, sensual and believable as Bad’s co-dependent. But it’s Bridges’ movie, even when he has to yield the screen to Colin Ferrell, adorned with ponytail and earrings, nicely playing a marquee name country star who’s cast as the prote´ge´ covering Bad’s songs, and sipping straight whiskey from a vitamin water bottle. But it’s Bridges who has all the keen insights into alcoholic behavior — from those flitting sips at the glass rim that get the whiskey and leave the ice undisturbed, to shading his bloodshot eyes onstage with aviators from which he’s cleaned the vomit when they fall into the trash can.
Bridges gives a sweaty, calibrated performance, and you ache to see him doing the real work during and after rehab, but screenwriter/director Scott Cooper refuses to go there. Working from the 1987 novel of the same title by Thomas Cobb, which was based on the late Hank Thompson, “Crazy Heart” skates over the drama of early recovery. Was it the right call? You get to decide, but Bridges’ transformation into a clean-and-sober, upright country artist sure happens fast. Bridges as Otis “Bad” Blake is far less dangerous and attractive than Bridges as Bad Blake. Why? It’s not explored. So “Crazy Heart” is a missed opportunity from that standpoint, but it rings true 90% of the time, which is more truth than 90% of American movies about alcoholism.
Kurt Brokaw is an Associate Teaching Professor at New School University, and teaches literature and film at the 92nd Street Y. He’s the film critic for The Independent Independent-Magazine.org.
