Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart

In the spirit of honoring the Academy Awards, this review will focus on Bridges’ Oscar winning role, rather than the entire film.  This seems more appropriate for an Oscar focused blog, especially since Crazy Heart is a film driven and focused on Bridges’ performance.  In the film, Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, an aging, washed up, alcoholic country singer.

What many people remember most from Crazy Heart is Bridges singing and playing his the songs.  Now, I’ve listened to classic country music most of my life.  Country may be easier on the guitar, but they come so close to the heart that the singing cannot be faked.  Bridges captures this idea in his voice perfectly.  And it doesn’t matter whether he is drunk on stage or solemnly writing new songs on his porch, that country style brought on by heartache and hard times shines through as if he were channeling Hank Williams.

The most powerful things Bridges shows us about Blake are his low points.  Sure, he can remember to dedicate a song to people he met earlier that day, but he will be too busy drunkenly vomiting outside to sing the song.  When he quietly walks out of the concert with Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell, who also sings his own numbers), who was hoping Blake would do a duet with him, we feel a mutual shame and disappointed in him.  And when he loses a child as he is trying to satisfy his thirst for whiskey, we know that things have gone too far.  The half-drunk, limping desperation Bridges brings in his frantic search in Houston is heartbreaking.

I never believed Bad Blake was really a bad person, just a man who had made some bad decisions.  Perhaps earlier in his life, Bad was more appropriate, but who we are shown is a man stuck with an old name he cannot shake.  It seems to be one of the things keeping him in his rut.  As the film progresses, his atonement for the bad decisions he made becomes more fulfilled.  If there were doubts about Blake’s good side, they are washed away.

So far, this has been Bridges’ only Oscar win.  Since 1971, in The Last Picture Show, he has been nominated by the Academy for six acting nominations, three for lead actor and three for supporting.  His most recent nomination was in 2010 for playing Rooster Cogburn in True Grit.

If I wasn’t lied to, the Oscar statue I held back when I first began this project was intended to go to the winner of Best Actor of 2009.  I’m sure my fingerprints, along with countless others, were wiped clean before the ceremony, but it is still fun to think that I got to hold Jeff Bridges’ Oscar back when I was just hoping that it would go to him.

“Ain’t rememberin’ wonderful?”

Tender Mercies

While Terms of Endearment is your quirky girl-time tear-jerker that mothers and daughters can paint their toes to, Tender Mercies is your stronger, quieter type of family drama that the men won’t immediately flee from.

Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a broken down middle-aged man who was once a great country singer.  The first image we see of him is a drunk silhouette in a motel room fighting over a bottle of booze, then we see his greasy bald head pass out on the floor.  It seems that somewhere on that floor, Mac realized he was nowhere and needed to get back up.  He’s got no money and nowhere to go, so he humbly asks the motel owner Rosa (Tess Harper) if he can work for her.  She’s a kind woman and they can help each other out.

This little motel on the side of a dusty road is in the middle of nowhere under the big Texas sky.  It looks like one of the loneliest places in the world, and maybe it is.  It’s just Rosa and her son Sonny (Allan Hubbard) who live there and they’re all the family each other has.  Sonny’s father was killed in Vietnam when he was just a baby, leaving Rosa a widow at eighteen.  And Sonny is getting to a curious age where he’s asking more and more questions about the father he never knew.

As Mac works for Rosa, he becomes part of the family.  It’s nearly odd how Mac so quietly becomes a part of Rosa and Sonny’s life.  We’ve hardly seen a conversation with Rosa before Mac asks to marry her.  But maybe that’s just how it is here in dusty lonely Texas, there’s no need for long winded conversations and you can really hear the few people your around much better.

Mac and Rosa are married before we even know about Mac’s troubled past.  He was once married to Dixie (Betty Buckley) who’s still a successful country singer and they have a daughter who’s nearly eighteen.  Mac writes a new song, gives it to Dixie hoping she can make some use out of it and hopes to see his daughter.  When Dixie throws the song in Mac’s face and refuses to let him see his daughter, it nearly drives Mac to the bottle again.

While this is a story about Mac getting his life back together, it seems he’s not always ready to just plunge into the waters.  When his daughter comes out to the motel to meet him, it’s not exactly hugs, tears and sweeping violins.  The air feels stifling in that little yellow living room as she tries to share her life with Mac.  She tells him about her boyfriend, how her mother disapproves and asks if it was him who used to sing her a certain lullaby.  Mac lies and says he doesn’t remember it, like he’s just not ready to be that fond memory for her.  Yet in the field across the street, under the wide blue sky, Rosa and Sonny talk easily.  Maybe they just have more air to breathe.

Now, there are a few things you can probably guess will happen in this film, but there are a few sucker punches that make this film feel real, not like some after school special.  This is a bleak, spread out and lonely world where second chances don’t come along so easily.  It seems that girls get married too early and it never works out.  Many dads never come back home and leave kids with so many questions.  So you can’t ask for much and you’ll only be disappointed if you expect too much.  In Tender Mercies, you’ve got to hold onto whatever little happiness you can find.

“I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.”

Nashville

Is there anything more American than country music?  And on the eve of the bicentennial, hoo doggies!  In Nashville, we’re transported to, uh, Nashville and witness different characters tied in to country music while they all gather together, at the end, for a political rally.  Just a few key characters are Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the current queen of country music, who collapses from exhaustion at the airport.  There’s Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), who might have once been the king of country, but now he walks around in his white bedazzled jumpsuit and sports an obvious hairpiece.  And Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) is a journalist from the BBC who is just fascinated by all things American.

The main thing to remember about this film is that it is 1975.  Recently there’s been the moon landing, Woodstock, the Civil Rights Movement and three key assassinations.  These key moments have shaped the people and events that run this film and it’s really brilliant to think about.

The great thing about this film is how it explores American culture and Nashville is the perfect setting.  When a twenty car pile up happens, it turns into a party where country music hopefuls practice together and swap stories, only inconveniencing the big stars.  The city isn’t just attracting backwoods rednecks anymore, blacks and hippies are bringing their own sounds and it’s catching on, bringing more desperation on Hamilton’s jumpsuit.

Driving around Nashville non stop is a van spreading the message about Hal Philip Walker running for president and hosting the big rally at the end of the film.  The van plays his droning recordings, and at times they become a soundtrack to the film.

Some fun bits I really enjoyed and could identify with were when Opal is at a junkyard talking about America’s excessive graveyard of cars.  During the Grand Ole Opry there’s an advertisement for GooGoo Clusters, which I’ve only found on a pit stop in Georgia, but they are goo-ood.  And there’s a scene at an early Nascar race.  There’s so many “only in America” moments I wanted to drag my couch on the porch to watch the rest of the movie.

Imagine how this film would be made today.  We’re living the post 9-11 America under our first Black president who’s trying to give us universal healthcare and all the ignorant rednecks afraid of change, but smart enough to toss their clan cloaks, are taking to the streets with picket signs while the rest of us live vicariously through the internet and the children are forgotten and getting fat as hippos.  We don’t have respect for other cultures.  Country songs now include the lyrics like, “We’ll put a boot up your ass, because it’s the American way.”  We defend bratty kids who use American symbols as a form of bullying.  There seems to be a new bomb threat in Times Square every day.  And now Arizona’s got this ridiculous immigration law. God bless America.

Coal Miner’s Daughter

Unfortunately, there are probably too many young people out there who don’t know who Loretta Lynn is.  Not many people listen to classic country music today when there’s Lady Gaga, T-Pain and YouTube.  But my mom’s side is from Kentucky, I grew up with radios tuned to country and I have some fond memories of watching The Grand Ole Opry with my grandma.  So maybe I’m just one of the few in my generation that could really appreciate Coal Miner’s Daughter.

It’s the story of country singer Loretta Lynn (Sissy Spacek) as she rises from her humble beginning in Appalachia Kentucky.  Her daddy slaves away in the coal mine and her mama takes care of eight kids.  Loretta gets married at thirteen and starts having babies at fourteen.  In no time, she’s got a whole slew of kids to take care of.  Her husband notices Loretta’s natural talented voice and gets her a guitar for an anniversary gift.  She takes to the guitar like a duck to water, singing to her kids.  Though Loretta’s reluctant and shy at first, her husband pushes her to make a record and then to drive across Kentucky and Tennessee promoting it at every radio station they find.  Before she even knows it, Loretta’s a star on the charts.

Sissy Spacek gives the performance of a lifetime and wins the Oscar for her role as Loretta.  She’s able to raise Loretta up from a naive, innocent girl, to a shy woman peddling her records all the way to a glitzy star on the big stage while always keeping her strictly Loretta.  Mastering that distinct hillbilly drawl seems challenging enough, but Sissy also sang all the songs in the film.

Just as they have always been, Lynn’s songs are wonderful.  They’re the only suitable soundtrack and bring out the true heart of Lynn’s story.  If you enjoy country music at all, that’s enough to put Coal Miner’s Daughter on a must watch list.

“I done wrote me a song Betty Sue. Your mama dadgome songwriter now.”