Good Acting for the most part

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2010)

I agree with many of the other reviewers and just want to add my two cent.
Bridges is a fantastic actor. A look from him can say more than a thousand words (or a look from Keanu Reeves). Jeff Bridges carries this movie, which has a significantly flat and predictable story, however.
What's worst about the story (or rather the script) is that it's streamlined after a certain school of writing, which still turns screenplays into three-act setups. Sure, it makes it easier to write a script that way, but this type of script always feels the same, because of the pace rather than the quality of what's shown.
This could have been a brilliant movie (and here's one difference to "Walk the Line": compassion for the protagonists. Instead I felt like roles were filled out according to the plan. Maggie plays the overprotective mother, who cannot stop worrying about her son. She is overtly responsible for her life, because her son depends on her maturity. Jeff plays just the opposite and the scene where he loses the boy in the shopping mall is plain stupid.
First of all - an Alcoholic doesn't get drunk off one whiskey like that. Secondly - it's not like the same thing doesn't happen to other people around the world millions of times. If you can't blame it on your alcoholism, losing a child in a dense mall is just accepted as "can happen", or so it seems.
I'm complaining here, because this is the key scene to the entire movie. It doesn't even matter that you know about it now, because each scene depends on another. Yet, to make this the big climax seems as generic as it gets.
My conclusion! You have: great acting, predictable and generic plot, climax in the wrong place, neutral ending. From a writer's perspective Crazy Heart is neither original nor decisive. It doesn't glorify anything. It doesn't have any morale and the change Jeff/Bad undergoes is very superficial. In the end, his manager and the douchebag Garth Brooks clone run his life for him. He's just "with the show", not running it. Bad has become what he always feared the most: a functioning member of the society he sings about. A cog in a machine that will run with or without him. This script has no honesty, it just wants to get done with its plot-points. In the end "Bad" achieved nothing and an honest drunk is more worth to me than a sober liar.