Happy Birthday Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart

Happy Birthday Jeff! Here’s a review from 2010 of the film that brought him his first, long-deserved Oscar .

Crazy Heart

Directed by Scott Cooper

Is Jeff Bridges the best actor in Hollywood? The apparent ease with which he inhabits the bones of every role he plays has earned him, at last, an Oscar, and it’s about time. After 4 nominations over nearly 40 years (for the Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Starman, and The Contender) it’s finally come, for this entertaining, gently moving film, transmuted by his performance from what on paper looks a pretty average tale, of a self-destructive man finding redemption in the love of a good woman, with country music as a sound track. 

He plays, or rather is, Bad Blake (‘call me Bad’), ageing, amiable, rootless country musician, drunk, serially divorced, absent father, and writer of sorrowful songs. We meet Bad, now coming to the end of the line, performing on the edge of things, in bowling halls and small bars in dusty towns across the country, where his name still means a lot to some of the old faithful. His days are spent in dingy motel rooms, half-heartedly watching porn movies, eating fast food and drinking. A horrible parody, you might say, of the carefree slacker life of The Dude, and with echoes , though it is nowhere near so great a film, of last year’s The Wrestler.

He’s so seldom more than an arm’s length away from  a glass of bourbon (except when the money runs out) that one’s liver shudders at the sight of all that brown liquid disappearing inside him. Yet he’s still, for the most part, a gentleman, courteous, amiable and with a sense of humour at his own failings. And great with kids, when he strikes up an unlikely relationship with the ‘good woman’, Maggie Gyllenhaal, bright single mother journalist.  But in the shape these movies always take, his happiness isn’t so easy to nail down. Great, unflashy performances from all around him – Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell as his once young disciple, now a star who eclipses his mentor but still has time and respect for him, and a lovely cameo from Robert Duvall (looking, thank goodness, a deal better than when last seen in The Road) as an old buddy. The surprise is, or maybe not, what a great performer Bridges is, and what poetry he makes out of those so nearly sentimental songs. 

The best songs, says Bad, are those you feel like you’ve heard before, and maybe that’s part of his secret: always with a Bridges character you feel like you recognise as familiar something inside him, a common humanity, a lust for life. Here’s to you, Dude!

Seen at Empire Cinema Newcastle, March 9 2010, originally reviewed in floatationsuite.com

Mariam

Directed by Sharipa Urazbayeva

Mariam lives on a tiny farm on the Kazakh steppe, many miles away from a town, some distance down a path from a dirt road. There are few rooms, little heating, and the only electricity, sufficient for a couple of hours a day, comes from a rudimentary solar generator. When her husband rides off and doesn’t return, she’s left with only her young son to help with the farm business, looking after cattle for the landowner. When a smaller girl and a baby emerge from the bedroom and we learn there is also an older brother in boarding school in the town, we realise the enormity of her situation, especially when the landowners take away their cattle, her only source of income.

This stunning debut feature from young Kazakh director Urazbayeva is all the more impressive when you know the background. Meruert Sabbusinova, who plays Mariam, inspired the whole thing after Urazbayeva came across her during the making of a TV documentary, and the basis of the plot is her own predicament when her husband disappeared and she was left without help to rear her children alone. Urazbayeva made the film with her own money, using non-professional actors.

For Mariam a trip to the police station in town brings the shattering news that she is not entitled to any help unless her husband is proved to be dead. Officialdom is not unfriendly but the already evident patriarchal nature of Kazakh society makes an ugly appearance in the policeman’s jokey supposition that her husband’s left her for another woman.

Sabbusinova’s situation, shockingly displayed like the documentary it actually is, is then developed into a plot which throws up moral dilemmas when an old school friend attempts to help, and Mariam, cheating the rotten system, gains something of a life for herself. For the first time we see her smile, and confidence and signs of a rather more liberated lifestyle follow. But the husband returns…

Shot in realist documentary fashion, we feel every physical effort of mother and son – even the sheep-killing scene is real (the meat subsequently providing a meal for the film cast and crew). The wind blows comfortlessly over the grassland, the cold is palpable, and there are many moments of sheer poetry, bleak though it is, by superb cinematographer Samat Sharipov. Opening shots smack you in the face with wind-lashed yellow grass across a monochrome landscape and the disturbing sound of Mariam’s despairing cries for her husband. And in the final shot the whiteness of snowflakes has joined the palette. It’s winter, even more bleak than before.

Mariam was among a week-long series of films streamed free in late October by The Calvert 22 Foundation, which via the online Calvert Journal showcases contemporary culture in the ‘New East’, the area of Eastern Europe, Balkans and Central Asia.