It shines through its simplicity and plucks at all the right chords.

Rating: 9/10 (25 June 2010)

Let me write this right away, right after I've turned the DVD off and while the experience still lingers warmly in my mind. Oh, how I do love a good independent picture: quiet, subtle, but an emotional powerhouse fueled by a strong lead performance for which there are no words. Such is the description that immediately comes to mind for Scott Cooper's "Crazy Heart", a film that urges the viewer to accept a bittersweet shred of life and savour its tenderness and rawness equally.
The film is a fictional biopic of Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) a once famous country singer who is well beyond his prime, whose career is reduced to playing on random bars and bowling alleys and who, at the age of 57, is forced to look back on his life and accept the fact he never amounted much to anything. The film's first scenes give you a breath-taking view of New Mexico's arid landscapes: beautiful, sparse, lonely and poetic...and these first images set the precise tone the film is gonna take. They will follow Bad through his minor, depressing gigs around the West, they'll see his life unravel under the influence of alcohol, and they will see his spirit rise to indescribably poignant levels after meeting a small-town journalist called Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who's to become the most important lover he'll ever have and the catalyst that incites a major change in his personality, eventually leading him to become a better man.
Now, I'm not a big fan of biopics, especially if they deal with down-on-their-luck country singers and their booze addiction- we've seen too many of those, haven't we? There's not a single new thing to learn from yet another biopic peppered in country music. Well, that's wrong. This film came out last year and I immediately KNEW I wanted to stay away from it. Not even after Jeff Bridges won worldwide accolades and the film's theme song "The Weary Kind" started earning so much buzz did I think to care about it. A friend of mine got me a copy of the DVD some months ago and it had been sitting there in my shelf for quite some time without the slightest thought...until a lonely night like this found me wallowing in my boredom. I reached for the DVD, shot it into the player and, oh my God, was I prepared for the emotional tour-de-force! Jeff Bridges is heavenly perfection in this role...and that's too soft a word to credit his performance. My God, he inhabits Bad Blake in ways few actors have ever managed to make characters their own. We've seen him play a wide array of characters through his career (with films so extremely different like "The Prince of Tides," "The Big Lebowski," "Masked and Anonymous", etc.), and in most cases he manages to do a very good job with his characters...but there are just some roles you're BORN to play, and Bad Blake was his role. Bad is a man of few words, he's not a troublemaker, he's...well, he's your common Joe. He's REAL, he's a man I can assure you've met before. But how to make this man seem special, seem familiar, seem HUMAN in a two-hour and forty-seven minute film is no easy task. Screenplays can give an excellent characterization, great acting can give depth, great directing can make a character believable to us...but to make a character jump out of the screen, move you and treat you to such sharp pieces of life, and all through his normalcy, well that's the work of a genius, no less.
The plot of the film is something we've seen a million times before. Nothing unexpected happens; no huge or witty twists move the plot forward. The charm of it all is how life-like it all seems, how every gesture, every line, every character seems familiar and warms us to them. Life is never as interesting as Hollywood pictures make them out to be; life is never an intelligent social commentary or even a profound work of art...life is life: simple, hard, bittersweet and undeniably poignant. THAT'S what both critics and audiences love so much about "Crazy Heart": how, in its simplicity, it so faithfully projects life back at us, injecting our minds with the invigorating truths and heartaches that trouble us all. The center and heart of the film is Bad's relationship with Jean, and we root and cheer for them every second they're together and crave their return whenever they're apart; whenever something bad or sad happens to them, we feel just as bad as they do, because they're people we actually care about. They're real.
Not only the acting is excellent, but many other aspects of the film are too. I've already mentioned the beautiful landscapes, but the cinematography as a whole is very good too: it embraces the scene whatever the action therein may be- no camera tricks, no specialized lighting, no sweeping movements or dramatic dollies...it's straightforward and convincing. The music is excellent- the score is muted and the songs compliment the action on screen (especially the aforementioned Academy Award-winning 'The Weary Kind', which closes the entire film and the topics dealt therein in such subtle beauty that you can't help but weep at its message), the costume and production design are very good. And the screenplay is very, VERY good, featuring naturally-flowing dialogue and some believable, show-stopping one-liners (including the now legendary scene where Jean, beautiful and half-hidden under lamp light asks Bad what he's thinking about and he, after pondering a few seconds, struck by her beauty and by the dangerous topics the conversation is going through, answers "I was just thinking how bad you make this room look, and I hadn't noticed that until you came here.").
See the film. Rating: 4 stars out of 4!!