Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a couple of films that are making their way into art houses around America this week or at least expanding to more theaters (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Enjoy…
CRAZY HEART
Sometimes a film is great because the story being told is so utterly original, it floors you that the story hasn't been told before. That doesn't happen too often in the course of any given year. But sometimes, it's about how a fairly familiar story is told and who's telling it. With CRAZY HEART, the feature directing debut from actor Scott Cooper (who adapted the story from a book by Thomas Cobb), there's something familiar about most aspects to this story, especially if you've seen any film about an entertainer whose success has be tempered by drugs or alcohol. But by inserting Jeff Bridges, one of our greatest living actors, into the lead role of country singer Bad Blake, this age-old tale is given new life and a fresh perspective that somehow still manages to feel iconic and well worn.
You get the sense early on that Bad Blake enjoyed a certain level of success years earlier but never as much as some of country's most successful heroes. Seeming to channel parts of Kris Kristofferson with a touch Merle Haggard, Bad still has small pockets of devoted fans that come to dive bars and bowling alleys to watch him plow through a greatest hits set with whatever local band is willing to back him. The performances are often a struggle, but he's been doing this job long enough that he can always make it through just long enough to drink as many drinks as people will buy him before, during, and after his set before he hops into his busted up pick-up truck to go to the next city. (During one show, he exits the stage mid-song to run into the alley to throw up.) Some nights, he'll let a local groupie into his bed, but he's usually gone the next morning before they wake up.
It's clear that Bad hates this life, the miniscule pay that comes with it, and his place in the world of music. But when he hops on stage, he comes to life a bit more than you might expect. He's always somewhat bitter that a younger singer that he tough to play guitar and occasionally wrote for and recorded with has gone onto huge success while Bad is stuck playing the bible belt. Bridges has never been an actor who has cared about looking his worst on screen for the sake of a role, but he really lets himself go to pot to play Bad, who we often see in his underwear (or at least well on his way to losing his pants) and looking about as grizzled and unappealing as you possibly can.
Into Bad's life comes Jean, a budding music writer played with her usual combination of dignified wisdom and grace by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Even though she has a young son (Jack Nation) and a history with falling for the wrong guys, Jean spends enough time with Bad in the course of putting her story together to fall for him the way hundreds have before her, the difference being that Bad falls hard for her too. CRAZY HEART doesn't have much in the way of story, and that suits these characters just fine. The film is about building characters and observing them coexist as best they can. I'm not spoiling anything by saying that Bad does his share of letting people during the course of our slice of time with him. But he also takes a real stab at self improvement, and that might be the strangest turn this movie takes.
It's not exactly an original thought on my part to compared CRAZY HEART to the lovely 1983 Robert Duvall vehicle TENDER MERCIES, also about a country singer, and the comparison is driven home by Duvall appearing late in CRAZY HEART as Wayne, a bar owner and one of Bad's old pals. But both films benefit a tremendous amount from the silence between the words. And it's in these moments that Bridges shows us just why he has continued to impress us for decades. This isn't a film about heroes and villains; it's simply about people who we wouldn't think twice about in our daily lives. If storytelling and powerful acting can make me care about people like this, I'm on board. CRAZY HEART is not a great movie, but it's told in a noble way that makes watching it a great experience. And it's Jeff Bridges, for God's sake, you have to go.
A SINGLE MAN
Timing is everything, and in the early 1960s, the time was not good for a gay man to be public about his orientation, even in Los Angeles. George (a remarkably heartfelt, understated Colin Firth) is a college English professor whose younger lover Jim (Matthew Goode) has recently died, and George, understandably so, is devastated but unable to properly, openly mourn, making his loss all the more painful. A SINGLE MAN is a unique film if for no other reason than it's about emotions more than story, which I'm sure thrills you all. But in truth this debut feature from renowned fashion designer Tom Ford is one of the more mesmerizing experiences I've had this year. Although occasionally a bit too self aware as a visual exercise, A SINGLE MAN is largely restrained and tempered as a profile of loss and coping.
George is not only "single," but he's also well into middle age and fearful that the best years of his life are behind him with Jim's death. Firth has always been a favorite of mine, playing most roles as buttoned-up but still charming. But George in A SINGLE MAN is an entirely different and more refined beast, and the result is by far the best work of Firth's career. In the present day, he's tragic, lost, and fragile; in the flashbacks to better times with Goode, he's positively glowing and full of hope. If nothing else, George is the most fully realized character Frith has ever played. And when we meet him at the peak of his loneliness, George has decided that this day will be the day he dies.
But George is no hermit in his grieving. He heads out to visit his old friend (and clearly former lover) Charley, a drunken whirlwind played by Julianne Moore, who George decides to visit before his immaculately planned suicide. Moore reminds us, even with limited screen time, that there are no small parts, only parts that require a fiery, boozy redhead who absolutely reeks of a fatal mix of sophistication and desperation. She knows that George is gay, but that doesn't stop her from making a pass at him on her shag carpet. She's fantastic, and nothing more needs to be said.
George has a few choice encounters of what he intends to be his last night on earth, including one with a gay hustler (Jon Kortajarena) hanging outside a liquor store. Their exchange is one of the most interesting things in the film, and reveals more about George's soul than just about anything else in A SINGLE MAN. And make no mistake, A SINGLE MAN is most definitely a movie about soul. George also has an exchange with one of his students (Nicholas Hoult, who played the young man in ABOUT A BOY) outside a bar that holds particular meaning to him. The young man is clearly taken with his teacher and is almost humorously clumsy with his come on.
Ford adapted the screenplay with David Scearce from a book by Christopher Isherwood, and in lesser hands, I think this material might have been slight and self-indulgent. But there is so much heart and soul in A SINGLE MAN thanks largely to Firth and an elegantly sparse visual style from Ford that most of the shortcomings are easily brushed aside. This is a lovely effort with a gentle yet intense take on the subject of loss, with a performance at its core that is easily one of the year's best.
POLICE, ADJECTIVE
If you are a fan of recent films from Romania, then the pacing and themes of POLICE, ADJECTIVE might not come across as so strange. The film is the story of a young undercover police officer named Cristi, who is following a high school boy who likes to smoke a bit of hashish. Although Cristi sees the young man offer hash to his friends (a crime punishable by jail time in Romania), the officer decides to continue following the student in the hopes of uncovering a larger drug distribution network. To this point, the plot probably makes perfect sense. But it's at this juncture where POLICE, ADJECTIVE does the unexpected.
Rather than simply follow the path of a typical cop drama, the film takes up to the police headquarters where Cristi must explain his plan to continue surveillance rather than make an arrest. The final half hour or so of the film is a moral and ethical debate between the two men (with a third in the room to act as the slightly dopey Greek chorus) about the definitions of conscience, law, morality, and police. It's a strange exercise that I was pulled into, but a lot of people are going to drift into disbelief at the abandoning of what originally appeared to be the main though line. The two men don't so much debate, as the superior officer engages in a systematic breakdown of everything Cristi believes in (for example, Cristi believes the antiquated laws about punishing those who simply offer drugs will be overturned soon; his boss says that doesn't matter).
In the end, the struggle is about what feels right vs. doing your job. POLICE, ADJECTIVE took me completely by surprise even if it did lead me astray to a still-satisfying conclusion. Some may consider this work an endurance test, but I reveled in the idea that what begins as a typical police story turns into something worth considering and discussing long after the film ends. If you're in for something far beyond what's floating around in mainstream theaters this month, POLICE, ADJECTIVE may surprise and possibly floor you.
-- Capone
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