Crazy Heart

Starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Scott Cooper. 112 minutes. Rated R.

You’d think an actor with Jeff Bridges’ talent and range would have won an Oscar by now. But winning an Academy Award includes being a good Hollywood citizen, and Bridges has made a cause out of subverting everything that Movietown holds dear. Until his portrayal of the country musician Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, that is.

This film, Bridges’ 73^rd, lands somewhere between the second half of Walk the Line, the fall and rise of Johnny Cash biopic, and George Clooney’s corporate Boomer coming of age story, Up in the Air. It’s got the full line of Jeff Bridges gritty, troubled accoutrement but it’s lighter weight and warmer. Think of it as the movie equivalent of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline or discovering featherless bipeds on Mars. I think there’s a good chance that Crazy Heart may finally give the Academy a good excuse to honor the least celebrated major actor of his generation.

Although he was born Hollywood royalty, the son of Sea Hunt’s Lloyd Bridges and brother of Beau, Jeff Bridges didn’t seem to want that role. From the get-go he seemed committed to stunting his career growth by playing quirky characters like The Dude in The Big Lebowski or nasty ones like Jack Kelson in American Heart. Bridges’ performances are often stunning and complex, but he usually forgets to even wave in the direction of a Hollywood ending. That’s considered heresy in Beverley Hills if done too many times, with too little box office, and Bridges has rarely done anything else.

Crazy Hear is about an aging music legend universally loved and admired by everyone except himself. By the time we catch up with him in the opening credits, Bad Blake is a scruffy, sullen man driving an ancient Chevy Suburban through a desolate, seemingly endless landscape. He looks like he’s been heading for the horizon line for decades without a pit stop, the top button of his jeans unbuttoned to give this fat man and his belly more face time. He’s long ago left himself for road kill but just can’t seem to stay put.

Bad was once a top shelf entertainer, but now, pushing 60, he hasn’t written a song in years and he’s working the bottom of the country music food chain, trying to stay alive. He gets so sloppy drunk before his shows in the lounge areas of bowling alleys and kicker bars that you don’t think he’ll ever make it to the microphone; and when he does, you fear he’ll say something crude or insulting.

But Bad turns out to be not so bad. He comes alive when he’s singing for the audience and even seems to enjoy doing requests. His fans eat up his words like blue comfort food, all these variations on the Ur country song of never quite getting it right for very long in life or love. Bad’s got a wounded heart, not a crazy one, and he’s made a career out of it, but not a life.

Then along comes Jane Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a 30 something local reporter who wants to interview Mr. Blake. Gyllenhaal has the wonderfully casual feline grace of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, liquid eyes large and wondering: how in the hell am I ever going to get out of this rut I’m in, but mouth giving no clues. Despite the difference in age and hygiene between Jane and Bad, there’s real chemistry between them. And like all people who are in love or hoping to be, they do their best to make the puzzle pieces fit even when they don’t.

And so it goes.

There are two entertaining sub-plots. Robert Duval (The Godfather, et.al.) plays Wayne, who is either Bad’s father and/or his AA sponsor, a tough love kind of guy, one of the few invulnerable to Bad’s charm. Approaching age 80, Duval can’t reach as far or as fast as he once did but he’s still a treat to watch.

Colin Farrell (The New World) plays Tommy Sweet, the next generation of country music star. He’s made his name and fortune singing Bad’s songs but Blake resents the way Tommy has made his original hardscrabble lyrics sound sweet and light. Like Jane, Tommy is free and clear of the myriad warts and tics afflicting Bad and this makes its plot point. But, like much of the story, this feels forced and artificial.

Crazy Heart may not be Jeff Bridges best film but it is the arguably the most tender-hearted and audience pleasing, as close to mainstream as this career iconoclast is ever likely to get. I’ll bet the farm that he wins Best Actor on March 7. It’s also possible that Bad Blake may become the iconic hero for this decade, the way Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate) was for the ‘60’s and James Dean’s Jim Stark (Rebel Without a Cause) was for the ‘50’s. Our beat-up nation sorely needs a mulligan right now, and Bad Blake just might be the ticket.

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The Lovely Bones

Bones are not usually considered lovely, except maybe by orthopedists and dinosaur hunters. But there are certainly times when we humans know something deep in our bones, things that escape the notice of our squishier, chattier hearts, brains and guts. Director Peter Jackson’s new film, The Lovely Bones, gets inside the marrow of life, the stuff spawning all the other stuff, the hard-wired love and fear.

The film is based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel of the same name. It’s about Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl who is murdered by her creepy-yet-plausibly -respectable-serial-killer-neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), and the impact this crime has on her family and friends. The movie is set in the relative innocence of 1970’s suburban Pennsylvania, a time before children’s pictures began to appear on milk cartons and tabloid journalism met cable TV.

The celebrated director of King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy has added muscle and verve to Sebold’s meditative story, and horror. Jackson is at the top of his game when he’s channeling his inner Stephen King, luring us into darker realms of human experience, and this is quite the opposite of Sebold’s transcendent book. It’s still a powerful story but this marriage of such opposite sensibilities and styles seems destined to disappoint fans of both the director and the author.

Still, there are many memorable, disturbing scenes in this film. When Harvey is about to kill Susie, the action cuts to the young girl running silently through the inside of what looks like her family’s home. But there’s no trace of anyone there now, it’s an archeological ruin, everything stained and faded under a haze of milky white, the graffiti of eternity. The artful special effects here muffle the impact of Susie’s death, one of the reasons the film is rated PG-13 rather than R. Like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Susie stays in the movie and helps to make things work out as much as anyone can from behind the looking glass, as much as people’s lives can work out after a senseless murder.

Susie’s dad, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg), once a thoroughly amiable CPA, slowly goes rogue after his daughter’s death, stalking every man he suspects of killing his daughter. Abigail, Susie’s attentive mom (Rachel Weisz), gradually disappears from herself and then everyone else. But while Susie’s parents are falling apart, her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) begins to blossom, out now from under her big sister’s shadow. Life goes on, even if we don’t want it to, just as it stops even if we don’t want it to, and the film does a good job of choreographing the unpredictable steps of this dance.

Even in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, I think it’s fair to say that Peter Jackson is still the King Kong of lyrical special effects, Matisse to Jimmy’s Picasso. In one of Bones most graphic scenes, Harvey is shown in his bathtub some time after the murder, so still, the lighting so cold, he might be dead. We cut to blood on a porcelain sink, an image sharp enough to be a police forensic photo but lurid and painterly. The camera lingers like a butterfly, silent and unconcerned, then flits over a muddy pair of shoes, a knife, a darkly stained shirt, the vocabulary of the unspeakable.

At the other end of the emotional scale, there’s Susie in a kind of a pre-heaven staging area where she pops up periodically. In Sebold’s book pre-heaven is the Zen version of Albert Brook’s Defending Your Life, a place where Susie learns to evolve past the concerns and interests of her life, all life, the thousand unnatural shocks we are all heir to. In Jackson’s film, pre-heaven is a depicted as a kind of mobile wafting above a Flower Child’s crib, a continuous loop of cuddly and coo.

Some may welcome the succor this sweetness provides as antidote to murder most foul. But, even for talented people like Jackson, sometimes less is not only more, it’s what saves an otherwise powerful movie from seeming silly.

Saoirse Ronan, who looks like the girl on the cover of the Blind Faith album, is appealing as Susie but seems superficial, no Scarlet Johansson in Horse Whisperer she. Of course it’s possible that she was exceptionally at good conveying the teen as tabula rasa, a life eternally budded and unblossomed. I hope she gets another feature role where she doesn’t have to compete with so many special effects.

The Road

There are no yellow bricks on director John Hillcoat’s new movie The Road, and no rainbows at the end of it either. It’s an after-our-civilization-has-finally-gone-and-blown-itself-up movie, a deliberately not entertaining Mad Max or Water World. Let’s call it a grim, gritty flick stained stark and bleak with fear. But if you can hang in there long enough (not easy), there’s a meditation on love, too.

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is not your standard issue post-apocalyptic revenge fantasy. There are no avenging angels come to settle the score with wayward humans, neither tight-lipped ones wearing shades like in Book of Eli or quirky, loose-lipped ones like in the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men. It’s too late for all that cosmic accounting, you'd best forget about salvation for the human race; we’re toast.

Viggo Mortensen stars as the Man, the father of a nine year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the Boy. Both miss the Woman (Charlize Theron), wife and mother respectively, who mysteriously disappeared the night the sky turned the color of a blood orange and the world became ash shrouded and sunless, eerily and ubiquitously like Lower Manhattan the day after the World Trade Towers fell. Those few that survived are too stunned to ask why and too desperate to give in to despair.

Meaning may be dead, but life goes on. The movie chronicles the furtive, nomadic efforts of the Man and the Boy scrambling to survive. Their life consists of hunting for food all the time while guarding against being hunted by other people. The Man morphs into a trampoline of survivalist nerve endings, on high alert 24/7. He is quick to assume that a very old, gimpy man they encounter (Robert Duval) is going to kill them and steal their meager belongings. But the Boy begs his father to give the man some of their food, which he eventually does. And so it goes, the story of human history.

Pretty bleak stuff. The Man and the Boy are sustained by their affection for each other and the stubborn belief that the Woman is out there somewhere, waiting for them and not Godot. They aren’t much different than most of us, only most us of still have our creature comforts to keep us warm.

The Young Victoria

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s Hollywood movies delivered emotional justice to a nation brutalized by Wall Street shenanigans. Films like The Public Enemy, starring Jimmy Cagney as a snappy gangster and Jean Harlow as his snazzy girlfriend, were glamorous revenge fantasies, sticking it to the Man. Frank Capra films, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, worked the other side of the street, serving up patriotic-flavored redemption fantasies about simple, decent people (like Jimmy Stewart) triumphing over the corrupt political system.

The recently released British film, The Young Victoria, gives us a little of both at the same time. Like Blind Side, Precious, Julie and Julia and Invictus, this film is part of cinema’s Stimulus Package of heroic tales that prove that anyone can do anything, however formidable the obstacles. All they have to do is be honest, work hard and believe in themselves. It’s intended as triage, a jolt of reassuring can-do.

Emily Blunt (My Summer of Love, The Devil Wears Prada) plays young Victoria, the sole heir-in-waiting to the throne of England. She’s a spirited, thoughtful young girl who has been taught to behave like an old lady by her mother (Miranda Richardson), The Dutchess of Kent. Victoria is not even allowed to walk down stairs by herself, part of a scheme to keep her weak so that the Dutchess and her fuming, feral consort, Sir John Conroy, can rule England as regents.

This Byzantine power play and its dust devils of palace intrigue are, of course, staples of the heavy drama section of the Western canon. But French Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee manages to keep it light, almost frothy, while still hewing to the historical record. He sketches his story with quick, sure strokes: Victoria, finally wriggling free of her regent’s claws, learns to rule an empire, falls in love with her soul mate Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) and sets about revitalizing stuffy old England beyond the palace walls.

It’s a sweet natured, easy to follow story with no ambiguity about who’s wearing the white hats, history as hygienic, Top 40 entertainment. If this sounds dull and predictable, that’s because it is. But the heart doesn’t need creativity, just connection with real needs, and this is where the film succeeds (though perhaps not royally).

In actual fact, Victoria was a revolutionary leader with a tender heart. She took revenge on the ruthless system that had oppressed her by reforming it, making it care more about people and less about power. All this without spilling a drop of blood on the Persian carpeting, blue or otherwise.

Victoria, the queen, must have been a bit red in tooth and claw like every ruler but Victoria, the movie, gives us the night off from Machiavellian jousting. It does a nice job of tweaking the veil of hopeless about what passes for government these days, and that’s at least a place to start around the gyre again.