Not that he ever seemed to mind. This is as it should be for a no-sweat star who might now be best known for his turn as the Dude — or “His Dudeness. Or Duder. Or, you know, El Duderino” — the middle-age stoner in the Coen brothers’ 1998 comedy “The Big Lebowski.” His Bridges-ness has been called “the Zen-ist of all actors” by his friend the musician T Bone Burnett, who helped create the music Mr. Bridges performs as Bad Blake in “Crazy Heart.” As Bad, a black-hatted country musician with a booze-pickled liver, he eases into a lovely groove, plucking at pain, strumming self-pity (“I used to be somebody/But now I am somebody else”), in a turn that has resonated with critics and will probably also play well at the Oscars.
“Crazy Heart” is an ingratiating, achy-heartbreaky male weepie (that black hat soon makes way for white) stuffed with pretty-as-a-postcard landscape shots and toe-tapping tunes. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye in the film, but it has its truths, including the music and Mr. Bridges generously felt performance, which brings you into the story and keeps you there. Working at a lower register, he adds plenty of gravel to his vocal performance, so that you can hear all the cigarettes, booze and late nights in Bad’s voice as vividly as you see them in the gut that spills over his belt.
The movie is nowhere near crazy enough, which makes it safe Academy Award fodder. No matter. Mr. Bridges has put in the time, including as a nominee. He first attracted Oscar’s attention for his breakout role in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 elegy about a dying Texas town in the 1950s, only to lose to his co-star Ben Johnson, a veteran who had ridden for John Ford. Mr. Bridges was also nominated for best supporting actor for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974), losing to Robert De Niro in “The Godfather Part II,” and again in 2001 for “The Contender,” losing to Benicio Del Toro in “Traffic”. Nominated for best actor for “Starman,” he lost that one to F. Murray Abraham in “Amadeus.”
All these Bridges performances had something to recommend them, but over the years most of his best work has been in smaller, even forgotten titles, like “Cutter’s Way,” a 1981 drama about three friends from the director Ivan Passer. Like many of Mr. Bridges’s finest features, it did not attract masses of love or money, musts in the Oscar calculus. His persuasive turn as the bluntly named Richard Bone, a tarnished golden boy who lives off women and becomes involved in a mystery, probably didn’t help. Unlike his friend Cutter (John Heard), the one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Vietnam veteran, Bone represents the generation that stayed home. “Richard Bone,” says Cutter, ”doing what he does best: walking away.” Fully bodied and wholly alienated, Bone finally does rise to the occasion, but he scarcely saves the day.
In an earlier age, say, that of his father, Lloyd Bridges, a character actor perhaps best remembered for his 1950s television series “Sea Hunt,” Jeff Bridges might not have had the chance to explore such ambiguities. Unlike his father and actor-brother, Beau, he was built to play heroes. But he comes into the movies in the 1970s, when the battles over Vietnam were raging in Southeast Asia and the United States and the old certainties were rapidly giving way to new doubts. Many of the best American films of this era were richly contradictory and shaded by dark thoughts and characters, not just ravishing technique. These were films, to borrow a wonderful phrase from the critic Robin Wood, which “seem to crack open before our eyes.”
Whether by inclination, agent representation, luck or just the fashions of the day, Mr. Bridges has largely gravitated away from the heroic. He first shows up in the movies as a baby in a 1951 drama, “The Company She Keeps,” alongside his brother and their mother, the actress Dorothy Dean. Two decades later he joins movie history as Duane, the bewildered high school football captain who necks at the movies with Ms. Shepherd’s heartbreaker in “The Last Picture Show.” Wounded, a little lost, Duane set the template for a Bridges type who was down on his luck and maybe skimming bottom, at times with a smile that looked far too innocent for an actor who soon made a habit of quietly taking over his films.
In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer, a sly con artist, a moonshiner turned car racer, a squealer turned suicide, a thief and a cattle rustler, working with veterans like John Huston (“Fat City” in 1972) and newcomers like Michael Cimino, who, for his 1974 debut, directed Mr. Bridges alongside Clint Eastwood in the crime story “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” The critics had started to pay attention. “Sometimes, just on his own,” Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in “The Last American Hero” (1973), “Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing.” Notably, she also compared him to Robert De Niro, who was about to set fire to screens in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”
“He probably can’t do the outrageous explosive scenes that Robert De Niro brings off in ‘Mean Streets,’ ” she wrote. “But De Niro — a real winner — is best when he’s coming on and showing off. Jeff Bridges just moves into a role and lives in it — so deep in it that the little things seem to come straight from the character’s soul.”
But in the 1970s male actors didn’t necessarily earn the juiciest parts for going deep on the little things, as suggested by the ascendancy of Mr. De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, James Caan and Dustin Hoffman, among others, who had nuance but also volume. The era’s most enduring heroes were obsessed and often obsessive, given to railing at diner waitresses and their own lovers, robbing banks and waving around guns, screaming at one another and alone in existential solitude. Their outsize pain did not make an obvious fit for Mr. Bridges. His age helped explain his roles, though it’s a good guess that his California surfer looks were a factor, especially since Robert Redford had a lock on that type for much of the decade.
In the 1980s American cinema was dominated by the logic of the blockbuster and cartoons of masculinity so uncomplicated they were known by their first names: Arnold, Sly, Bruce and Mel. These were not easy times for Mr. Bridges, whose early entry into high-concept terrain had been the 1976 “King Kong,” a widely perceived flop made in the wake of the “Jaws” juggernaut. He made it out unscathed, going on to survive “Heaven’s Gate” (1980). In 1982 he made the science-fiction film “Tron” while “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” topped the charts and “Blade Runner” changed the genre. That same decade, he starred in a slick, sexed-up thriller, except this one was a yawn (“Jagged Edge”), not a pop-cultural shocker (“Fatal Attraction”).
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Jeff Bridges was excellent in this movie. The acting in this movie was top notch and filled with humor. I appreciate this movie a lot.
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