Jeff Bridges is getting a lot of buzz and he deserves it. He gives one of his best performances in CRAZY HEARTas Bad Blake, a down and dirty, hard-drinking country music singer, who’s career is on the skids as he’s reduced to playing bowling alleys and sleazy bars throughout the Southwest. Crazy Heart just might be this year’s Sideways or Juno, a small film that comes out of nowhere to get significant awards interest. It almost didn’t, as distributor Fox-Searchlight was originally going to open it this spring. Bridges performance changed that. “You don’t get a chance like this to often, “says Bridges about all the attention he’s been getting. Bridges passed on the script early on, he admitted, “because there wasn’t any music attached to it.” Then when his friend T Bone Burnett was hired to do the score, Bridges signed on. “I knew the music was going to be top notch, and that got me to the party really quick.”
T-Bone Burnett, is a Grammy-winning and Oscar nominated composer (“Walk the Line, “O Brother Where Art Thou”) and he brought singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham in to co-write the Crazy Heart theme song, “The Weary Kid”. Burnett also selected hits by Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Buck Owens and Kitty Wells to ground the film’s soundtrack in time-tested standards and balanced it with some newer tunes by Bingham, Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams. He then wrote some original songs, co-written by the late Stephen Bruton, and sung by Bridges, Robert Duvall and Colin Ferrell in the film. It isn’t easy creating classic songs for a country legend that never existed, but Burnett pulled it off and the film’s soundtrack is moving up the charts.
Still the reason to see Crazy Heart is Jeff Bridges. Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, he’s never won. This should be the year that the Academy remedies that. His performance reminds us how good an actor Bridges is, he’s not showy, his best performances have a way of quietly sneaking up on you (The Last Picture Show, The Contender). “Playing a musician, who spends his life on the road, isn’t that different from the life of an actor. There is a similarity to acting and singing,” says Bridges. His chemistry with co-star Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays a single mother small-town reporter who falls for her interview subject, is pitch perfect. The film is in some ways, reminiscent of Robert Duvall’s turn in Tender Mercies that won Duvall an Oscar. Look for Duvall (who also produced) as one of Bad’s cronies and Colin Ferrell as a former protégé. You don’t have to like country music to like Crazy Heart – one of the year’s best films. Crazy Heart, rated R, stars Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Ferrell and Robert Duvall.
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