Movie Review: Crazy Heart

Hollywood, at its best, instructs us with archetypical characters: The soaring goodness of Atticus Finch,  the relentless villainy of The Joker, the eternal love of Jack and Kate. Even biopics such as that of Nelson Mandela in Invictus tend to be painted with an epic brush.

Because humanity is so complex, it is much, much harder to write a script that echoes real life, with the confusing mix of selfishness, self-destructive tendencies, and divine spark that make up a real person. A film about a played-out country music star comes closer than most, giving us the human condition on an intimate scale. Crazy Heart stars Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake and Maggie Gyllenhaal as the woman who wants to love him, in performances that are already earning them Oscar buzz.

Bad Blake travels the Southwest in a rusty truck, playing his guitar in bars, and, to his shame, sometimes even bowling alleys. He likes his women nameless, his cigarettes plentiful, and his whiskey out of the bottle. Blake's protegee, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), has gone on to fame and fortune while Blake wallows in what could have been. He's living out some tarnished fantasy of a hard-drinking country star, but the reality is vomiting in alley trashcans and depressing flops with tawdry women past their prime. He keeps himself submerged at the bottom of the bottle to avoid seeing his life for what it really is.

An aspiring music journalist with a past of her own, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), comes to interview him. Jean, decades younger, intelligent, and wounded, has pieced her life together for the sake of her little son.

She's special. She matters in a way that none of the wanton women eyeing him in bars ever could.

The brilliance of this film is that it is so very human. Bad Blake doesn't seem so bad. Sure, he destroys himself with drink, but he's the kind of drunk you want to like. You want to look past his string of failed marriages and bad career choices. There's something about him, in his core that matters.

Which is, in real life, the worst kind of bad guy. The kind you don't see coming. The kind that feels good, but is so very bad for you and people you love. Jean sees past his drinking and facade to something worth knowing, something worth loving, but it costs her dearly.

And because this film cleaves so close to real life and real people, it's true that there is something worth loving about him, buried deep under all the mess. However, it's not up to Jean to tease it out. Blake has to dig himself out.

 Ultimately, this film is about second, or thirty-second, chances. It's also about consequences for the way you live your life. The choices we make and the actions we take matter. There is a better future available, for those who repent of their mistakes, but it may not be what had been available before.  

This conundrum is the great promise and the great tragedy of being human. Not many films even approach striking that balance.