Crazy Heart
2009
***
Director: Scott Cooper
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Paul Herman, Jack Nation
Bad Blake is a washed-out country singer/songwriter and serial divorcee whose glory days are long gone. Now he's 57 and forced to play bars and bowling alleys just to make ends meet. In Santa Fe, he meets a young mother who gives him another shot at happiness, if only he can lay off the booze. Jeff Bridges deserved his long overdue best actor Oscar. He sings, plays and inhabits the character so completely that it's easy to forget you're watching a performance. Sadly the story from Thomas Cobb's novel is as cheesy as your run-of-the-mill country song. The characters are clichéd, the romance never feels plausible, and the ending, though not predictable, is flat. "The Weary Kind" by Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett won the Academy Award for best original song.
