Crazy Heart
Director: Scott Cooper
Our Beloved Month of August
Director: Miguel Gomes
“Jeff Bridges is 1-5 at best for his role as a broken country & western old-timer with a drink problem in Crazy Heart”, wrote the Racing Post’s Jeremy Chapman in an Oscar-tipping piece earlier this month, “and Hollywood insiders reckon it is ‘his turn’ rather than his greatest performance.”
And with all due respect to Bridges’ Academy Award opposition – George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus) and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) – it’s hard to disagree with this assessment or the stingy odds on offer from the likes of Ladbroke, Coral and William Hill.
And while Crazy Heart, an “indie” picture produced for a modest $7 million and originally intended for TV and DVD, may not be the best movie Bridges ever been associated with – that would still be Peter Bogdanovich’s timeless The Last Picture Show, followed by Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way – it’s certainly a heck of a long way from the worst, and infinitely preferable to his most recent big-screen outing in the misbegotten Men Who Stare at Goats.
Based on a long out-of-print novel by Thomas Cobb, it’s written and directed by newcomer Scott Cooper, whom Bridges rather graciously (and generously) describes on his lovely handwritten website as “one of the best directors I ever worked with.”
The fact that Cobb’s novel was published as long ago as 1987 means that any similarities between the plot here and that of Darren Aronofsky’s barnstorming masterpiece The Wrestler – whose heartbreaking lead Mickey Rourke was, let’s not forget, pipped at the post come Oscar-time – are clearly accidental. But they’re hard to shake, as we observe how washed-up country singer Bad Blake (Bridges) finds belated redemption through the love of a good woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal, herself Oscar-nominated as single-mother journalist Jean.)
True, we’ve seen this story countless times before in various guises – it’s even a little corny here and there in some of its more predictable and sentimental moments. But cutting-edge originality isn’t exactly the mother lode of country and western music and there’s no disgrace in taking an old fiddle and plucking out a nifty, familiar-sounding tune on it. Indeed, as Bad remarks at one point, the best C&W songs sound like you’ve already heard them before. Crazy Heart, featuring music by T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton, does include a convincing array of tunes for Bad and his sometime protégé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) to perform – the latter enjoying the kind of
big-time success that is now only a bittersweet memory for his booze-addled mentor.
But maybe there are third acts in some American lives, regardless of what F Scott Fitzgerald might have believed, and we observe how Bad is inspired by Jean to write what might just be his comeback number. The film is thus, in effect, the biopic of a song rather than a person, so it’s appropriate that “The Weary Kind” has earned an Oscar nomination for composers Burnett and Ryan Bingham The song doesn’t sound like much when you first hear it, but it lingers in the memory – just like Crazy Heart, in fact.
Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese writer-director who has made a couple of features and a handful of shorts, but whose Our Beloved Month of August now becomes his first film to obtain commercial, if limited, British distribution.
This film gets full marks for ambition and originality. A genially sprawling exercise in post-modernity, it combines documentary and fiction to craft a multi-layered portrait of a certain corner of the Portuguese countryside. The place comes alive each August when it hosts a series of travelling music bands that go from village to village staging outdoor concerts, playing cheesy pop with romantic lyrics. The first half of the film is a fairly “straight” documentary with an ethnographic and anthropological bent, immersing us in the particularities and peculiarities of place. The second half sees the emphasis change, and a wispy story develops about one of the bands, in which singer Tania (Sonia Bandera) edges towards a romance with her cousin Helder (Fabio Oliviera).
Gomes seems to be probing the gaps between humdrum reality and the creation of art – “low” (the pop songs) or “high” (art cinema.) His playful, self-referential approach – Gomes pops up from time to time, playing a version of himself– works up to a point. However, after a while, a patronising atmosphere starts to intrude. The incorporation of an incest sub-plot is particularly awkward and, in the end, there isn’t enough substance to sustain the elaborate structure. There’s considerable talent here, but it’s still in a rough-formed state.
