Crazy Heart (film rant)

So, approximately fourteen months after it was fashionable to do so, I finally got around to seeing Crazy Heart. It was immensely watchable and Jeff Bridges, as usual, was phenomenal. But two days later there's still something about the film that keeps hounding me.

a good man named Bad (?)

In film studies there's this notion of the difference between plot and story. Plot includes all the images and sounds that the spectator actually encounters over the course of a narrative, whereas story refers to all the things not seen, not heard, that are necessary for constructing and maintaining coherent meaning(s).

I've decided that the gap between the plot and story in Crazy Heart is what I find so troublesome. Specifically, the relationship between Bridge's character and his love interest Maggie Gyllenhaal.

true love, not Grit

Apparently thirty-something, educated, professional, single mothers really go for sixty year-old, overweight, over-the-hill, alcoholic has-beens.

Or is he a never-was?

Either way, it's beside the point.

The point is that their (apparent) affection was both predictable and totally unbelievable. The scenes between them were sweet, took the obligatory turn for the worse, and ended in the compromised happy ending so prevalent in the bio-pic genre. My main difficulty wasn't the narrative's lack of originality, though, but rather the veracity of the romance.

One simple question: what did Bad offer Jeanie?

She seems too wise and experienced to be taken in by him, and there is nothing in her character's portrayal to lead one to believe that she is after his waning fame or non-existent wealth. Furthermore, the melodrama depends on a surplus of "authentic" emotion to fulfill its objectives, which makes me hesitant to read Jeanie as not really loving Bad, or being cynical about their relationship, or conceiving of him as a potential father figure. For the film to work at all, one must assume their feelings for one another were genuine.

But the plot is unable to sustain this story, and the scenes fail to establish what qualities or experiences fostered this deep affection between them. Obviously he is attracted to her youth, but what did she get out of it?

Security?

No.

Reliability?

No.

Vitality?

No.

What Jeanie got, besides the trauma of losing her son, was sex with drunkard as old as her father. Bad, on the other hand, got a new lease on life, a new career, and some sense of redemption for the price of a single royalty check delivered in the final reel.

This exchange of money was far and away the most problematic aspect of the film, implying that all the damage caused by Bad could be transubstantiated in the closing minutes, absolving him of his past karma and freeing up to move into the future. It's a strange moment where the ideology of the Dollar, sexual politics, and the American faith in new beginnings converge against the backdrop of the Western horizon...

And suffocate in the diesel fumes of the tour bus.