Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhal turn in very nice performances in Crazy Heart, another of so many movies/stories of American lost men on lost roads [Paris, Texas; Don't Come Knocking; Red Lights, based on a Simenon novel; all the Randolf Scott/Bud Boetticher collaborations - The Tall T, Ride Lonesome] featuring wide open western landscapes that appeal to everybody’s shuck the maddening crowd sensibility. In our fantasies, of course, the deserts, the plains, the tumbleweed, the austere table-top hills retain something cozy about them; we can be alone and then come home. In the real lives of marginal men like Bad Blake, the country musician Bridges portrays, there’s nothing very cozy about it at all. Miles and miles of roads, slender paydays, no where to turn but the bottle creates a life not many would chose if they could see the whole package at the beginning.
Bad Blake at 57 looks 77. He’s at the sorry end of a once promising career, driving to whatever gigs his agent can get him, backed by young hopefuls with guitars and drums in barrooms and bowling allies where the audience is all about his age, living the lives of their remembered youths in the nostalgia of his songs. In Santa Fe Jean (Gylenhall) comes to interview him and (inexplicably) is attracted to him, and he, more explicably, to her. He sourly accepts a big payday to be the warm-up act for his earlier protege, Tommy Sweet who, young and studly, is attracting the crowds and the big dollars. Sweet acknowledges, on stage and personally, his debt to Blake. Coming on the heels of the new affection Blake finds in Jeanie, we see the possibility of self worth returning and a way out of the Blake’s self sought hell. Both Sweet and Blake’s agent keep hammering him for new songs though he claims he’s washed up and they don’t come like they used to. A bad accident, Jean’s devotion, and that of her young son, move Blake back into song writing. An alcohol induced near tragedy with the young boy leads to his separation from Jean and his final turn from alcohol and a modest tale of redemption, not saturated in the Hollywood obvious but real enough…
The music is quite respectable for music-made-for-movies, and the sound track with other familiar country tinged tunes is very nice.
So, does the who package work? Modestly, I’d say.
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