Jeff Bridges took home to Oscar for his performance as the alcoholic, washed up country musician Bad Blake. Aside from a good performance, however, there's little else that grabs you in Scott Cooper's drama. This is mostly because it feels like he is simply revisiting territory that The Wrestler has already conquered the year before. While Aronofsky's film was artistic, filled with layers of subtext and was overpoweringly emotional though, Crazy Heart is both conventional and empty.
Saturday 9 October 2010
FILM CHALLENGE: 146) Crazy Heart
Added Jan 6, 2010,
146) Crazy Heart
Director: Scott Cooper
Year: 2009
Plot Summary: Bad Blake is a broken-down, hard-living country music singer who's had way too many marriages, far too many years on the road and one too many drinks way too many times. But when he meets Jean, a journalist who discovers the real man behind the musician, he attempts to find salvation.
In many ways, it's simply just a melodrama in disguise, falling into the same category as a movie like The Blind Side or Seabiscuit, while pretending that its not. After all, Cooper gives the film a thick coating of sentiment and adds a sprinkle of inspiration in the final act of Crazy Heart too. It does have its moments when the movie is able to rise above the usual movies in this genre though. For example, the relationship he forms with Jean's four year old son, which Blake finds as a kind of redemption for the fact that he never got to watch his own son grow up, is a genuinely moving subplot that helps to show a sensitive, human side to the singer.
There are moments when it commendably steps away from the typical cliches of the genre too. The fact that Crazy Heart doesn't resolve the break up between Blake and Jean, for example, is very unusual in a melodrama. As is the conclusion to the aforementioned sub-plot with her son, who he never has the chance to see again. Nevertheless, this is Hollywood so the two main characters do still remain friends and the heartbreak does help to fight his alcoholism.
The performances all around are quite good with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall joining the cast. However, not a single one of them, Bridges included, did anything that blew me away. Maybe this is my love of Colin Firth's performance in A Single Man talking, but I can't see how anyone at the Oscars could prefer his role as Bad Blake over the subtle, internal and utterly heartbreaking turn that Firth made as George Falkoner. People can argue that 'it was his time' over and over, but I still think that it's a crime against art. After all, the award is for the Best Actor, not for someone's lifetime achievements, and nobody came close to being a better actor than Firth in 2009.
The movie is like Aerosmith's cover of Come Together by The Beatles. It's still enjoyable to listen to, but it doesn't really do anything different to the original and is unable to capture the dark beauty of their opening to Abbey Road. Crazy Heart is like a half decent cover version of Aronofsky's masterpiece The Wrestler that, while stripped of everything that made it incredible, still remains an interesting watch nonetheless.
3/5
2 comments:
I think it's unfair to compare it to The Wrestler because The Wrestler transcends the stereotype of this subgenre. Sure, it's the latest big one, but Crazy Heart is closer to a TV film. Agreed on its emptiness though a shame you didn't dig Bridges that much.
I didn't want to compare it to The Wrestler but I think it's impossible considering there are so many similarities. Connecting to estranged children, the near-death experience, the once popular entertainer still trying to make it, etc.
Bridges was okay. I'd have given him a nomination. But winning? Not a chance.
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