"It ain't the years, honey," Indiana Jones famously noted. "It's the mileage."
Bad Blake can relate.
For the 57-year-old country music-singing vagabond, the mileage has been massive. Like a wind-driven tumbleweed skipping across the desert floor, Bad traverses the forgotten back roads of the not so Wild West anymore, plying his craft for the faithful few old enough to remember hits penned in better years.
"It's funny how fallin' feels like flying," Bad warbles, "for a little while." True enough. And Bad's fall has been underway for decades.
Eking a living out of his '70s Silverado and mangy roadside hotels, the crusty troubadour travels wherever his manager can book him. Like, say, a bowling alley in Pueblo, Colo. A glance in the rearview mirror of the singer's life shows four failed marriages. As for faithfulness? Well, that's a virtue he's reserved for his one true love: whiskey.
The Ballad of Bad Blake, it seems, lacks only its inevitably tragic country conclusion. "I used to be somebody," he sings, "Now I am somebody else."
Until he rolls into sleepy Santa Fe, that is, where a young reporter shows up to interview him. Jean Craddock, a single mother of a 4-year-old, is eager to tell the former star's story. But as battered by the road as he is, Bad's still, well, bad. And Jean proves unable to resist his grimy charm, even though she says she knows better.
When the old singer's star begins to rise once more with the help of an old friend, it's only a matter of time before Bad's alcoholism sends his unlikely romance with Jean crashing back to earth.
CONCLUSION
"What's your real name?" Jean asks Bad early in their first interview.
"I'm Bad Blake. I was born Bad. When I die, my tombstone will have my real name on it. Until
then, I'm just going to stay Bad."
Except that, well, he doesn't. By the end of the film, Bad is not quite as bad as he was in the beginning--symbolized by his willingness to finally tell Jean his real name.
Like Mickey Rourke's starring turn in 2008's The Wrestler, Jeff Bridges inhabits Bad Blake's tired body and life in a way that's emotionally moving. First-time director Scott Cooper said of the story (which was adapted from Thomas Cobb's book), "What I really wanted to capture was the mixture of humor and pathos in Bad's life, and inject it with levity. Bad is an old dog who doesn't know if he has any new tricks, a man who will always go through peaks and valleys but his story moves, in spite of that, towards redemption."
The word redemption literally means "to buy something back." And divorcing it from its typically spiritual connotations, Crazy Heart shows us a man who slowly dares to hope that he can walk a different path than the destructive one that's guided his destiny and yielded little but bitterness and loneliness.
If Crazy Heart is a powerful story of redemption, though, it's also a story that doesn't flinch from picturing what its protagonist needs to be redeemed from. There's not much in Bad's life--from his drinking and smoking, to his vomiting and passing out, to his harsh language, to his willingness to hop in the sack with virtually anyone who's willing--that doesn't need redeeming.
SOURCE: Plugged In - Adam R. Holz
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