Up With Rock Bottom

The death of a parent, the unspoken-of death of a child and the soon-to-be-avenged murder of a spouse stand uncontested in the lexicon of film deaths. All three offer clean, efficient endearment to a character but keep that tang of gossip about them. There is nothing to confuse an audience in the misguided struggle of a young boy who has lost his parents (see Christian Bale in Newsies). However many apple carts the orphaned child kicks over, we understand why he struggles. He misses his mommy. In a way, we like this about him.

Similarly, we aren’t so much upset when, in Ordinary People, we learn that Timothy Hutton’s brother died tragically and no one’s allowed to talk about it, as we are thrilled, intrigued. What we’d really like is to give that tough little guy a trophy, we like him so much.

The advantages of a murdered spouse are limitless (see Mel Gibson’s great bit of Yiddish-style acting in Lethal Weapon).

Similar to the sensation of watching an orphaned child keep his chin up, we are afraid that we could also lose our loved ones while, simultaneously, we long for the kind of authenticity that such a drama would bring to our lives. We could add to this list avenging the death of/harm to a child. Liam Neeson’s performance in last year’s Taken was an almost comic exploration of how much merciless violence an audience will consume in the name of not without my daughter (see also Mel Gibson, this month, in Edge of Darkness, and, while we’re on the subject of Mel Gibson, we might mention his Oscar-winning film Braveheart in which William Wallace’s father and his wife are killed, making Braveheart, an exceedingly successful film by any measure, a kind of Rosetta Stone for what I’m talking about here.)

Alcoholism, though very-often gossiped about in real life, does not slice quite so cleanly. At first glance, it seems to offer as much ready-made conflict as the gallery of dead family members above: an alcoholic is irrationally bent on destroying himself. All appeals from the people who love him are useless. There is no cure. The only way out is a true reckoning with the self, a cathartic rebirth to a humble yet joyful, day-by-day existence. But the truth is, alcoholism just doesn’t get people off like murder does.

This fact was recently on display in the film Crazy Heart, in which Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a drop-his-sunglasses-in-his-own-puke-then-pick-them-up-and-shake-them-off drunk. Bad is a country singer far, far past his prime who eats his steak dinners out of Styrofoam, with plastic silverware, in a towel. The movie is so goofy and homely to begin with that I was unprepared when it revealed its deep, ugly knowledge of the life of an addict. While the film is certainly receiving praise, there is an odd tone to it. The focus is always on the performances. Bridges and his unlikely love interest, Maggie Gyllenhaal, are both nominated for Oscars but the film itself did not make the engorged list of ten nominations for best picture.

The same is true of an earlier film on the same subject, Leaving Las Vegas, for which Nicholas Cage received an Oscar while the film itself failed to receive even a nomination for best picture. Everyone knows the Oscars are just a bad pageant but they are instructive about where the middle of the road is and, in the same way that Crazy Heart is being dismissed as mere background for its incredible performances, Leaving Las Vegas was dismissed, in some cases, as pretentious trash lifted up by wonderful acting. Glenn Kenney’s 1996 video review of Leaving Las Vegas found “the film’s studied depiction of emotional and material squalor tedious,” but he agrees that “the movie is worth watching for the actors.” A.O. Scott’s NYT review of Crazy Heart feels the same. It’s “a small movie” he says “perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.” Later, patting the film on the head while rushing to shake Jeff Bridge’s hand, Scott says “there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Mr. Bridges.”

While its fun to pretend that we’d all line up to watch Jeff Bridges or Nicholas Cage “read from the phonebook” we wouldn’t, actually. Crazy Heart and Leaving Las Vegas are well acted but so were The Door in the Floor and Knowing and nobody showed up. Something beyond the acting resonates. While movies about alcoholism can be hollow, overly-tidy, redemptive tales (28 Days, When a Man Loves a Woman) Crazy Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, The Verdict and the great 1995 movie, Georgia, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (as close a relative to Crazy Heart as Tender Mercies is) prove that the subject is fertile ground.

A lot of ink is spilled over mafia and crime stories and their ability to expose the dark heart of “the American dream.” But nothing indicts like alcohol. Crazy Heart eases slyly into its central conflict: Bad Blake is a lovable, goodhearted man, but he is poisonous. Having taken to drinking to keep up with Bad, knowing that she is putting her young son in danger by letting him hang around, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) describes her attempt to live with him: “it’s like living with a rattlesnake.” That’s a great line for her but it’s also a neat description of the way that alcohol can become familiar to a person but never give up any of its savage power. This is echoed in one of Bad’s songs: “whiskey has been a thorn in your side and it doesn’t forgive.” Both phrases have a twangy feel but there’s nothing pat about them. There’s nothing maudlin, or easy, about watching Bad suffer the way he does. And I don’t think people like it. So we say “What a great performance!” and dismiss the film itself as simple or maudlin. But I think this reaction betrays discomfort at what we’re looking at.

Not everyone is an alcoholic, but the feelings that can surround alcoholism are common: self-pity, denial, depression. No one likes to think of themselves in these ways, these are unattractive qualities and have, basically, no place in a multiplex, except in the direct service of a redemption tale. And if that is the case, we’d prefer that the film merely “suggest” the most gruesome details as we can “probably imagine how bad it got.” Crazy Heart skips not one gruesome detail, is fascinated by the irrational, repetitive cycle of addiction.

This goes against the fundamental principle of “relatability” that governs mainstream movies. An orphan’s situation is sad but it’s not repellent. We are very willing to imagine ourselves in that same situation and like to hope we’d be as plucky and soulful. And if our lovely wife or husband were murdered, wouldn’t our anguish be just as heartfelt and gutsy? But the anguish of an addict is shameful and unappealing. What’s worse is that there’s no concrete, outside force (no cancer, no killer) to justify the character’s anguish. Addicts don’t deserve pity because they are the cause of their own downfall. The irony of this tends not to be dramatic but disgusting. Films that are structured this way will have cyclical, punishing structures that are liable to hinge on the performer’s ability to make them compelling, because the subject matter is unpleasant. But these movies are not “simple,” or “backdrops for great performances,” they’re challenges that put good actors in tough situations which is a better “formula” for success than holy, heroic relatability.

Who’s not sworn, over the bowl of a toilet, they’d never take another drink? Who’s kept that promise? Georgia stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the neglected little sister of a successful country-western singer (there’s a real trove of these movies, subtler, richer, crueler than the loud-mouthed Mafioso movies) whose own career is always derailed by her abuse. The film has the same casual, almost oblivious, manner that Crazy Heart has but it also has the hidden, poisonous teeth. The last scene cross-cuts between a worn-out, dead-eyed Leigh, singing at a bar and her painfully talented sister singing the same song, “No More Hard Times”, in front of a huge crowd. When a stranger at the bar sends Leigh a drink she thanks him with such easy gratitude, such indifference to the suffering that we’ve seen drinking cause her. It describes perfectly the quiet but incredible force of alcohol.

Crazy Heart’s conclusion is much sweeter. You could say that Bad is redeemed. But there’s a relationship between the endings of Crazy Heart and Werner Herzog’s goof-ball addition to the alcoholic-redeemed genre, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans, starring the above-mentioned Nicholas Cage. At the end of that movie, everything has gone mysteriously right for the Bad Lieutenant, but not from any action he’s taken. It seems a fickle god has decided to spare the rudderless Cage his life and satisfy his every desire. But we begin to wonder if this is really god’s mercy or some cruel punishment. If to live Cage’s cyclical, irrational and hopeless life is a worse punishment.

Otis “Bad” Blake is as surprised as anyone to find, at the end of the film, that he is a success, that the manager and the protégé he thought were his enemies are his friends and that his life in not finished but has, in a way, just begun. He even utters that pious mantra “one day at time.” Bad knows the pain of a hopeless life and his amazement and reverence for that phrase, the self-confidence and humility that it symbolizes, are instructive and uncommon to find in a movie. –Micah Bloomberg