A washed-up country singer, a bottle, a woman and one more chance at a song: there is nothing here you have not seen before. Jeff Bridges plays it so truthfully, and the songs are so good, that the familiarity hardly matters until the last twenty minutes.
Scott Cooper’s first film as director, adapted by him from Thomas Cobb’s novel, follows Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), fifty-seven, a country singer who once filled halls and now plays bowling alleys in the Southwest, driving himself between gigs with a bottle on the passenger seat. Everyone knows the shape of this: the drink, the woman, the reckoning. Cooper knows we know, and does not try to hide it. What he offers instead is Bridges, and for most of 112 minutes that is enough.
Bridges plays Bad as a man who has let himself go and is still, out of habit, a professional. He unbuckles his belt before he sits down and pours a drink before he takes off his hat, and when he gets on stage the belly and the sweat stop mattering because the voice is real and his timing is better than the band’s. He sings the songs himself, low and cracked and a little behind the beat, which is where a country singer should be. What we admired most is how little he asks for. There is no scene in which he tells us how far he has fallen; Bridges lets one look at a half-empty room do it.
Barry Markowitz shoots the Southwest in flat, hard afternoon light and the bars in whatever amber they already had, so Bad’s world looks like a place that has run out of things to hide. Waldemar Kalinowski gives every motel the same bedspread and the same lamp, and Doug Hall keeps Bad in one brown jacket and one pair of jeans across four states, so that a shave and a clean shirt register as an event. The songs, from T Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton, with The Weary Kind written by Burnett and Ryan Bingham (who turns up as Tony, one of the pickup musicians), are good enough that we would have bought the record, which is not something we can say of most films about musicians. John Axelrad and Jeffrey Ford let them play almost whole, and the film is better for it.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jean Craddock, a Santa Fe journalist and single mother who comes to interview Bad and stays. The script asks her to fall for a man twice her age who drinks before breakfast, and Gyllenhaal nearly makes it work by playing Jean as someone who knows exactly what she is doing and does it anyway. Robert Duvall, as Wayne, Bad’s bartender friend in Houston, is on screen for perhaps ten minutes, spends most of them fishing, and reminds anyone who remembers Tender Mercies (1983) that he once played this part himself. Colin Farrell is the surprise. As Tommy Sweet, the former protégé who now plays arenas, he is warm, slightly guilty and a decent singer, and the film’s best idea is that Tommy is not the villain.
The scene that got to us is in Phoenix, where Bad opens for Tommy’s crowd. Halfway through a song he walks off, is sick behind a bin, wipes his mouth and walks back to finish it. Bridges plays it without a flicker of self-pity and Cooper does not cut away; the band keeps time and so does he. We were moved more than we expected to be, because the film is not asking us to forgive him, only to notice that somewhere under all of it he is still good at this.
The trouble is the last half hour. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and after it the script, which had been content to watch, starts to arrange. Scenes that should take a week take a line. People forgive one another on schedule. The loose first hour, which felt like life, gives way to a story that knows where it is going and goes there without delay. We felt the gears turning, and we minded.
Tender Mercies did this with less and trusted its silences. The Wrestler (2008) took the same shape a year earlier and was crueller about it. Crazy Heart is kinder than either, and the kindness is both its virtue and its weakness: Cooper likes Bad too much to make him pay a full price. Still, the warmth is honestly come by, and the film never pretends he is anything other than a drunk.
See it for Bridges, for Farrell, and for the songs, and watch it at home, where the small rooms and the small gestures suit the screen. Do not expect to be surprised. It runs 112 minutes and reached British cinemas on 5 March 2010.
