Pick Up Your Crazy Heart

In a recent interview with Tin House magazine, the seasoned French novelist Amélie Nothomb shared her view that, “the biggest discovery in life is time.” While at its simplest, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart is a story about getting sober, it is also about a man awakening to the discovery of time.

Jeff Bridges is Bad Blake, a country western musician who is drinking his way through the death rattle of his career. He deplores his agent for booking him at bowling alleys, and bemoans “Tommy,” the movie’s Keith Urban for all intents and purposes, who made it big because of Bad and then abandoned him. Bridges conjures a sometimes too-vivid lecher—drunk, puking, chain-smoking, a mess of sweat on stage—Bad Blake is the reason Smell-o-Vision never got off the ground. Even the Dude had dignity. But despite his disgusting demeanor and inability to keep it together, Bad still attracts a small but devoted crowd of folksy fans from an earlier time, who love him simply for his music.

It isn’t until he starts an unlikely relationship with Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a budding journalist and young mother, that Bad begins to show he is a man worth saving. It is exactly these gradually revealed insights and measured pacing that makes this conventional story so unusually told. The film plays with time, focusing on age, years, the past: Bad is continually reminding the world that he is “57 years old,” and his relationship with Jean and Buddy, who occupy the two generations beneath his own, seem to illuminate for Bad all he has lost over the years, with four failed marriages and an estranged son. It isn’t until halfway through the movie it is revealed he has a home, which, by that time, is surprising to an audience that thought they had Bad all figured out.

The film takes full advantage of it own temporal medium by investing time in unexpected ways. The first quarter of the movie is spent painting Bad Blake as such a disgusting creature that the movie itself is off-putting. It seems like a stylistic error at the time, but very slowly the film builds confidence in Bad, as if it had been digging a hole for itself to climb out of. The film has work much harder than most to reconcile itself, as do the characters, the actors, and the audience, but it earns its sense of elevation and transformation. Bad’s redemption is total, and by the end he is beautiful to look at, visibly golden. He is a man who has discovered time, “one day at a time.” Everything that surrounds him is touched by this reversal, from Tommy and his manager, who are revealed to be his true friends, to his physical surroundings that open up from the decrepitude of his motel rooms and stanky bowling alley bars into vast, exultant big-sky landscapes.

Bad Blake is imaginary, but the music is real—classic country that combines the spirit of Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, and Kris Kristofferson with a hint of Leonard Cohen—and even though the songs hold the ideas of the movie, they still come off as genuine, especially since Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell do their own singing and playing. Bad’s first song of the film muses, “It’s funny how falling feels like flying…for a little while,” but when he closes with “pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try” we can see there is even an arc to the songwriting.

The performances were incendiary all around. Jeff Bridges easily deserves an Oscar for his command of the craft, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, girl of the moment, was perfectly cast. Colin Farrell does a dead-on western accent even though he is IRISH, and easily embodies a humble country star. Casting Robert Duvall as Bad’s friend-turned-sponsor was a small stroke of genius, not just because he added his own spark to the picture, but because he represents a nod to Tender Mercies, a film Crazy Heart emulates in many ways, and steers our minds, once again, to the passing of time.

Hopeful and devastating, and utterly beautiful, Crazy Heart delves, unembarrassed, into the culture of country western music, alcoholism, and redemption. Yes, it sounds like The Wrestler, but even if the plot is familiar, the storytelling is uniquely exquisite. -Christianne Hedtke

Director: Scott Cooper
Writer: Scott Cooper / Thomas Cobb