Film File - Crazy Heart

As everybody's favourite actor in everything from 'Fearless' to 'The Big Lebowski', Jeff Bridges has become one of the notable exceptions to Oscar glory. Nominated a number of times without ever taking home that elusive statuette, the highest profile member of that famous acting dynasty looks like finally ending the drought this year. As the well named country music singer, Bad Blake - a tragically romantic anti-hero, he is a broken-down, hard-living country music veteran with too many marriages, too long on the road and one too many drinks way too many times. In a business dominated by younger bucks twanging their way to stardom, Bad, at 57, is on the final furlong of his career playing ancient No 1 hits in third-rate beer joints and bowling alleys to aging crowds as drunk as he is, while his fleeting fame slides into obscurity. The most he can hope for these days is to open a big concert for his young protégé, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), who learned everything he knows about music from Bad - with the addition of managing his money better. A last chance at salvation happens for Bad one night in Santa Fe when he meets a local journalist Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her harder than usual. A single mother who's heard all those country chat-up lines before, Jean understands the devil in Bad, the things that made him what he is but which are also destroying him. It's a relationship that looks like going nowhere but down, unless Bad can find the courage to recall the talent that made him great in the first place. Based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb, and produced by actor Robert Duvall and country music maestro T Bone Burnett, Crazy Heart is a portrait of a man who has lived hard and reckless, but who still chases after the salvation of love when his heart gets what appears to be one last chance to redeem itself. Directed by former actor Scott Cooper, himself a Southener who grew up in the heart of bluegrass country, the book was one of America's best sellers and acclaimed by Kinky Friedman as "having characters cut cleanly out of America - the roadside West, the dance halls and beer joints, the occasional big concert . . .and the endless, eternal hotel rooms that are as close to home as any country singer ever gets. Bad Blake is a man you will not soon forget." The tale tries to capture the mixture of humour and pathos in Bad's life, and indeed in country music in general, and inject it with levity. "Bad is an old dog who doesn't know if he has any new tricks, a man who will always go through peaks and valleys but his story moves, in spite of that, towards redemption." From the first scene where Bridges steps out of his beat up car with his belt buckle undone to pour out the bottle of urine he's been collecting on the road, we are looking at Oscar material. As a tragic, funny, wise and wayward creation that could only have emerged from the bowels of the Deep South, he holds the film together and dwarfs all his fellow players. Gyllenhaal and Farrell are walk-ons compared to the only show in town - Bridges in a role he was born to play. Unlike Mickey Rourke in 'The Wrestler' last year, this is a tale of dashed hopes and last chances we can all relate to - and still find the uplifting sentiment upon which it is built. A feel good experience for a cold winter evening.