Dive Verdict: 2.5 of 5 Stars
As an excuse for tremendous acting, “Crazy Heart” is all that it’s cracked up to be.
Jeff Bridges is believable, lovable and pitiable as “Bad” Blake, a washed-up, alcoholic country musician trying to make a living and stage a comeback. Maggie Gyllenhaal could be any real-life music reporter who falls in love with her subject.
Robert Duvall doesn’t even seem like a professional actor in his role as Blake’s bartender buddy.
It’s as if a random old gringo were plucked off the street in the Tex-Mex borderlands, put in front of a camera, and told to be himself.
All this makes for a successful tone poem, a movie that conveys the spirit of its subjects. The tonal quality is in turn enhanced by its musical nature.
T-Bone Burnett wrote material for the soundtrack that got a well-deserved Oscar nod for Best Original Song.
And Bridges, lo and behold, can sing like a charm himself.
But none of this makes “Crazy Heart” a necessary movie.
There is nothing urgent or compelling here, nothing that screams out that it should be required viewing.
Its story is a bit like its main character: slobbish and constantly on the verge of cardiac arrest. Plenty of things happen.
Blake screws up his relationship with his new love. Blake finds an uneasy compromise with his one-time protégée turned pop-country star.
But they all feel reflexive, as if director Scott Cooper threw them in because, based on the subject, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
“Crazy Heart” also cripples itself by borrowing plot elements from 2008’s “The Wrestler,” another movie about a washed-up entertainer with an estranged child, a precarious romance and a heart condition.
Cooper’s movie might have the best soundtrack of the year, but Aronofsky’s was one of the best of the decade, and the former should have avoided any attempt at the comparison.
