Jeff Bridges is reuniting with the Coen brothers for their upcoming version of "True Grit."
As destructive country singer films go, Crazy Heart can’t come close to matching the unbridled intensity of the subgenre’s best effort, the blistering 1973 drama Payday, which starred a young Rip Torn in an orgy of unrepentant malevolence. Scott Cooper’s 2009 drama, which helped Jeff Bridges score his long-deserved Oscar, is a far gentler thing, focusing on an older alcoholic cowboy performer who has five wives and an adult son he doesn’t know in the rear-view mirror.
Vomiting in a garbage can outside of a New Mexico bowling alley where he’s performing, 57-year-old Bad Blake (Bridges) knows he can’t go any lower, but he has no intention of rising again. Bad tools around in his weathered pick-up from one Southwest rathole to another, playing his old hits, picking up barflies and staring at the bottom of a bottle, which might as well be the barrel of a gun. As his health deteriorates, Bad is afforded a pair of unlikely shots at redemption. His protege, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), who has eclipsed his mentor by a thousand miles, wants Bad to write some new songs for his album, which would mean a good deal of money to the penniless performer. More importantly, Bad meets a younger single mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who sees the goodness in him. The sympathetic woman and her young boy may be Bad’s last chance at some semblance of family.
“I wanna talk about how bad you make this room look,” he says to his new girlfriend as he sits in his fleabag motel room. “I never knew what a dump it was until you came in here.” But changing isn’t easy and redemption seldom comes in the form we desire, though it comes just the same if we try. (Available from Netflix and other venues.)
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