Crazy Heart

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar

Grade: B –

Director: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Ferrell, and Robert Duvall

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

“A recovering alcoholic country music singer/songwriter seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young woman and her son.”

Older, discerning filmgoers will recognize this synopsis of Tender Mercies, the 1983 Horton Foote-penned film that gave Robert Duvall his only Oscar. More than a quarter-century later, cinematic history is poised to repeat itself with Crazy Heart, a film with the same premise – and a supporting turn by Duvall, for Pete’s sake – that is probably going to give the just-nominated Jeff Bridges his first Academy Award.

Broadly, Crazy Heart rehashes the general theme of the down-and-out has-been looking for both personal and professional redemption. But its most glaring similarity with the likes of True Grit, Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler, and, yes, Tender Mercies is their ideation of the Jungian archetype of the Wise Old Man, an authority/father figure and spiritual guide that manifests itself in many forms. According the Jung, the Old Man represents the masculine unconscious for women. Conversely, one facet of his ascendancy to Wise Old Man is an integration of the feminine components of the psyche.

Thus, the Wise Old Man is often accompanied in literature by a young girl, personifying the melding of Logos and Eros (Meaning and Life). With the lone exception of The Wrestler, where the two main characters were closer in age, such is the case in all the films mentioned above. (As an ironic aside, Bridges is slated to star in an upcoming Coen Brothers remake of True Grit.)

In Crazy Heart, middle-aged boozy crooner ‘Bad’ Blake (Bridges) suffers a solitary life of faded glory. Once the toast of Nashville, Bad now drives his beat-up pickup from one dustbowl to another, staying in cheap motels and grinding out gigs in seedy bars and bowling allies. Bad’s salvation begins once he launches a romantic relationship with the much-younger Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an aspiring journalist and divorcée raising her 4-year-old son.

Besides its derivative storyline, this directorial debut from co-screenwriter Scott Cooper suffers from a lack of genuine chemistry between its lead actors. Beyond their distracting age difference (28 years), Gyllenhaal – long an indie darling who, admittedly, is also Oscar nominated for her performance here – has gradually devolved her once accomplished acting style into a collection of tics and mannerisms, suggesting a self-indulgence that demands roles and scenes adapt to her method instead of the other way around.

Conflict resolution comes easy, like speed bumps along the route to an altogether anticlimactic finish line. Bad’s sobriety is only an AA meeting montage away. His financial woes instantly vanish once he swallows his pride and starts composing songs again for former protégé, country music star Tommy Sweet (Colin Ferrell), who stands ready to help his erstwhile mentor. And when Bad visits a bar and loses track of Jean’s son, it only takes a few anxious moments for the boy to summarily turn-up; Jean’s ire at Bad’s irresponsibility is massively tempered by the fact that she lets an alcoholic scalawag babysit her son in the first place.

Still, even when Bad is at his baddest, he never fully loses his lovable Lebowski-esque charm. While Crazy Heart has as much originality as a country-standard cover band, Bridges’ terrific solo act is a showstopper. The film is transparently and unabashedly designed as a vehicle for his overdue Oscar, and, frankly, that’s a goal worth endorsing.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Road

Okay, where the heck did we park the car?

Grade: B

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Can an otherwise well-made film be so bleak that it ceases to be a good movie?

During the days – even weeks – it takes for the haunting, gripping film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to slowly seep into its audiences’ psyches, it becomes more than incidental to wonder whether misery might be a qualitative factor on which to judge a film’s merit, not merely a narrative device whose sole utility for prospective viewers is to help decide if a particular motion picture is their “kind of movie.”

The answer rests on whether such gloom and desolation are integral to story’s setting and spirit. In the case of McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (published the year after his No Country For Old Men), how else to depict the collapse of civilization and the end of nearly all life on Earth? Apocalyptic pap like 2012 and I Am Legend sell more tickets because people prefer their despair and anguish packaged as neutered, stylized escapism rather than anything approaching grim reality. By contrast, to portray The Road’s fictional post-apocalyptic landscape, director John Hillcoat shot scenes atop Mount St. Helens in Washington, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, and New Orleans neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

The crux of McCarthy’s text – and, in turn, Joe Penhall’s faithful screenplay – is not explaining or even showing the cataclysmic inferno that destroys nearly all the world’s plant and animal life. The closest director John Hillcoat comes are flashbacks to flickering reflections cast against the horrified faces of a Man (Viggo Mortensen, tremendous) and his Wife (Charlize Theron) (all the characters are nameless in the book and film).

Instead, the story focuses on the survival of the Man and his Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), born post-apocalypse, an odyssey that embodies the dual meaning of the film’s title. Their arduous journey to the coast in search of food, shelter, safety, and possibly other survivors carries them along treacherous highways and byways teeming with bandits and gangs of cannibals – even a feeble Old Man (Robert Duvall) is a source of potential danger. Seemingly abandoned houses hold the promise of uneaten foodstuff…or ghoulish cellars stocked with emaciated humans being harvested limb by limb. The Man saves his two remaining bullets so he can quickly kill himself and his son rather than allowing them to be captured and suffer unspeakable horrors.

Moreover, their trek suggests mankind’s path to rebirth and redemption. The Wife begged to abort her child rather than bring him into such a hellish world. The Man’s drive to survive is not motivated by strict self-preservation, but rather both his paternal instinct and the notion that his Boy’s life and innocence represent our only hope for a better future.

Where Hillcoat falters is that by delving so deeply – however understandable – into the dark recesses of man’s nature, he buries that sense of hope under a mountain of cynicism. Hillcoat displays a keen command of craft, setting, and atmosphere, as he did in his previous film, the similarly austere The Proposition. But, both films wait until their closing scenes to offer any reason for enduring optimism (each by virtue of acts performed by characters played by Guy Pearce, ironically).

Yet, this is not a reason to totally discount the film’s audacious viewpoint, striking production value, and fine cast, particularly Mortensen and Smit-McPhee. Despair is the toll you must pay to travel The Road. Still, it’s a trip worth taking.

Neil Morris