I’ve heard it said that the best time to see musical artists perform live is either when they’re on their way up or on their way down:  You get to see them in small, intimate venues, doing their best work, either before they get compromised by fame or after they’ve been chastened by their fall from it, in which case their artistry will only have deepened. (Or they’ll behave in some fascinatingly erratic way that makes for a funny story to tell your friends.)

In the movie Crazy Heart, we’re introduced to Bad Blake, a semi-legendary country & western singer-songwriter so far down the slope from fame that he’s been reduced to playing bowling alleys and small bars with local pick-up bands. Bad is played to perfection by Jeff Bridges, who by contrast has perhaps reached the pinnacle of his career, and without having been ruined by fame, despite being born into a Hollywood family, acting nearly his entire life and receiving consistent critical acclaim. Perhaps the fact that his work is always admired but never fawned over – or rewarded by Oscars – may account for his unspoiled approach to his job. He picks interesting roles in modestly budgeted movies and plays them masterfully.  If he wins the Oscar for Crazy Heart, as has been predicted, we’ll see if he suddenly goes all Nicolas Cage on us and starts turning out godawful performances in big budget dreck. But I find that unlikely.

I’ll confess up front that I’m a huge Bridges fan, one of the many who feel he’s been underrated and underappreciated his entire career.  Like an old-fashioned movie star, he makes it all look too easy, his preternaturally relaxed acting style giving the illusion that he just showed up on the set and tossed off the scene.  But unlike those old stars (or their contemporary counterparts like George Clooney), Bridges has always played a variety of roles.  He’s really a character actor in a leading man’s body (well, he was when he was young.  More on what he looks like now in just a bit.) By turns, he’s been Wild Bill Hickok, a seductive jazz pianist, a narcissist who butchers his own wife and sleeps with his defense attorney, a small-town doofus who can’t get it up for the girl of everyone’s dreams, an alien from another planet exploring Earth, a good-natured thief, a dim professional football player, the President of the United States, and many more – including, of course, the Dude.  

Of his turn in The Big Lebowski, I can only say that not only should he have been nominated for an Oscar, he should have won it hands-down.  The Dude is the quintessential Bridges role for seeming utterly effortless and goofy, merely an extension of his own laidback nature, rather than what it is:  A razor-sharp comic observation of both a familiar type (the stoner-slacker) as well as an utterly specific embodiment of a character so convincingly real that there are annual festivals to celebrate him. The Dude abides, indeed. Once you’ve met him on screen, he’s as unforgettable as Scarlett O’Hara, Han Solo, Dorothy Gale or Atticus Finch.

Bridges has never exhibited any vanity as an actor, but in Crazy Heart, he lets himself be more unattractive, in every conceivable way, than it’s possible to imagine any other major performer allowing.  (I love her, but even the chameleonic Meryl Streep wouldn’t dare get this ugly and naked.) Bad Blake is a 57 year old broken down alcoholic chain smoker, overweight and in sickly white-skinned ill health, and Bridges not only lets you see every wrinkle, gray hair, roll of fat and trickle of vomit that Blake’s body exudes, he makes no apologies for what he’s showing you, either physically or psychically. 

An almost clinical portrait of a narcissistic alcoholic, it's a daring performance, refusing that all-important likeability that American audiences demand in characters.  Bad is still a talented musician (at least when he’s not so drunk he has to run off-stage to vomit), and he might have once been charming, but we see at best only the distant echoes of that charm, mostly in the fawning attentions of middle-aged female fans who want to spend a night with him in a seedy motel room, where the dim light and the whiskey will blot out all the miles of bad road they’ve both seen since youth.

But where Bridges succeeds brilliantly, Crazy Heart fails miserably.  His portrait of Bad is so uncompromisingly real, and hews so closely both to the talent Bad still carries but also to the moral and behavioral failings that such a character would really have, that we can’t actually like him.  Even worse, the film asks us to believe that a fresh-faced woman in her 30’s, with a small child she adores and ambitions of her own, would fall for this bloated and seemingly worthless fellow.  

As played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the character of Jane is far too rational, organized and healthy to be believably drawn to Bad.  When she speaks of always choosing the wrong men, we have to take it on faith, as there’s nothing in her well-ordered life or self-presentation that suggests someone who’d give this old guy a tumble, much less fall in love with him as the script requires.  Either Jane needs to be more obviously neurotic, or Bad needs to be more overtly charming for us to buy this romance, even on the troubled terms it gets presented.

The other main story line in Crazy Heart is just as clichéd and only slightly more believable:  Bad’s protégé, Tommy Sweet, who has reached stardom with “faux country” music, reaches out to Bad to open his shows and supply him with some new songs, for which he’ll pay handsomely (handsome is what Tommy does).  A good actor, Colin Farrell, has been straddled with this dog of a role, and he seems to know he’s been miscast – he largely refuses to make eye contact with either Bad or the camera in any of his scenes.  As for believing that an Irishman in a ponytail and earring who is dressed like he's going to a Pearl Jam concert is an American country music star…well, I just focused on how often his Irish accent slipped out and left it at that.

This is one of those movies in which you see every scene coming before you even pay for your ticket.  There’s The Set-up (establishing how Bad lives up to his name), The Unlikely Love Affair, The Loyal Old Friend (played by one of the film's producers, Robert Duvall), The Tragic Thing That Almost Happens, The Fall Out from Tragic Thing That Almost Happens, The Secret from the Past, The Hitting Bottom, The Attempt to Make Things Right, and The Redemption.  Where one cliché is resisted, another steps in to fill its place:  Bad and Jane’s relationship has only two possible endings in Clichéland, and they picked Door #2. This movie makes the simplistic stories in country and western songs seem like something out of Chekhov.

Whether by coincidence or not, Crazy Heart producer Duvall starred in a movie in 1983 that had a strikingly similar storyline, but which played out quite differently.  Sternly resisting clichés and easy answers, it was as honest as Crazy Heart (aside from Bridges’ performance) seems dishonest.  That film was called Tender Mercies and Duvall deservedly won his only Oscar for playing Mac Sledge in it. 

If Bridges wins his own long-delayed and much-deserved Oscar for Crazy Heart, brace yourself for a slew of movies about good ole boys finding redemption after a hard life of drinking on the road, just so some actors can rack up their own shiny trinkets. 

I don’t think Clooney will stoop that low, but I’m a little worried about Nic Cage.

I was watching the Golden Globes while proofing this post, and in an eerie synchronicity, just as I finished it, Jeff Bridges won the GG for Crazy Heart. But in a perfect symbol for the lack of attention he's always gotten vs. showier actors, rather than focusing on Bridges when his name was announced as a nominee, the camera was on Leo DiCaprio!