Who's Bad?: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart

We see this old buck amble out of his ’78 Suburban, sunglasses on, pants undone, brimming jug of highway pee ready to be upturned on the sun-baked parking lot. He’s arrived at the bowling alley where he’s to play tonight’s show with some local band he’s yet to meet. He’s seen better days. His manager has to nag him to write some new material. He’s 57-years-old, he’s got $10 in his pocket and a bad dose of hemorrhoids, but he is, after all, a country singer, so this creaky list of lamentations means a new song should practically write itself. Crazy Heart is the story of how this singer hits rock bottom and starts to pull himself back up. It’s a very familiar tune played with some genuine freshness. It’s a well-crafted, thoughtful movie for adults. It might have been respectable and kinda ordinary, but it stars Jeff Bridges, a fact that elevates the picture to the level of something you probably don’t want to miss.

It’s nothing new to say that Bridges is one of the most underappreciated actors in American movies. They may be actors just as good that you’ve never heard of, but none who have spent so long on the cusp of the limelight, who've starred in countless big Hollywood movies yet is most beloved for the cult favourites. (You know what I'm talking about. This isn't Bridges' first time in a bowling alley.) Bad Blake, the weary yet resilient hero of Crazy Heart, an aging country troubadour addicted to booze, smokes, rough women and tawdry telenovelas, is yet another performance of shaggy beauty and pathos from Bridges, who already won the Golden Globe for the role and will hopefully get the Oscar he richly deserves. Bridges looks like Kris Kristofferson and sings a bit like Merle Haggard. The film’s music, a set of unusually strong and poignant songs, comes from T-Bone Burnett and Kristofferson’s late collaborator Stephen Bruton, but Bridges makes it his own, as he does with every gesture in the movie, however fleeting: the way he wakes from an accidental nap and muzzles three cigarettes from his bedside pack, the way he fumbles with a chain lock with no hook, or breads fish fillets while talking on the phone to a younger woman he’s fallen unnervingly in love with. It’s just a pleasure to watch him, even while he slips toward wreckage.

Based on the novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart marks the debut of actor turned writer/director Scott Cooper. There are more than enough elegantly wrought moments throughout the movie to prove Cooper’s got chops, such as the shot where we watch a witness to an accident rush toward a crashed car in the reflection of the driver’s half-open window. There are wonderful bits of dialogue. “How are you, Bad?” an old friend asks. “I’m worse,” replies Bad. “What do you want to talk about?” asks a fetching young interviewer, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I want to talk about how bad you make this room look.” There’s a supporting turn from an effortlessly charming Robert Duvall as a spry barkeep that’s virtually worth the ticket price alone. Duvall’s also one of the movie’s producers, and once played a country singer himself, in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies.

It’s only in the movie’s last third or so that it begins to reveal its weaknesses: a baldly contrived bit of conflict to hurl us toward climax, a too-neat final scene, a little much too much squinting from a well-meaning Colin Farrell as Bad’s hugely successful protégé, and the hurried unraveling of Gyllenhaal’s love interest, a character who feels a bit undernourished for the emotional gymnastics she’s asked to perform. But such a handful of bum notes can hardly steal anything from Crazy Heart’s resonant grace, one that flows from the heart of a rare young filmmaker more concerned with letting great actors create gentle magic onscreen than impressing restless viewers with empty glitz, two words that pretty much epitomize everything wrong not only with a lot of shitty movies but with most country music in the last 30 years or more.

Tripping over clues, while dreams go up in smoke: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Speaking of the end of the sixties (see preceding film review)... When we catch up with the Southern California counterculture at the start of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Penguin, $35) the rust has already started to eat away at the carburetor. It must be early 1970 from the sound of things. Manson’s going to trail. Cambodia’s getting pummeled. Drugs are getting uglier. Funkier Los Angeles is well on route to becoming a grid of massive real estate developments. Permanently groovy Gordita Beach private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, meanwhile, is getting a visit from his past that will prove more tumultuous than a mere flashback, however extended. His ex-girlfriend Shasta appears at his door one night with something like a job, something about a billionaire named Mickey Wolfmann who she appears to be in love with, who takes a lion’s share of the responsibility for the aforementioned real estate development binge, and who might just be about to get kidnapped. The whole thing makes Doc instantly nervous despite his wealth of first-hand experience with danger. “Doc had outrun souped-up Rolles full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he’s walked up back alleys east of the L.A. River with nothing but a borrowed ’fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed…” But still. If hippy telepathy counts for anything he’d better steel himself for some unusually not-so-good vibrations, a process which, like every other process in Doc’s daily doings, generally involves getting high. Perhaps a horoscope will be consulted.

Two related movies. In director Robert Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s iconoclastic and satirical adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s greatest novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself transplanted from the 1950s to the 1970s, where his once unshakable code of ethics dissolves in a post-hippy haze. In the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (98), a wildly imaginative pastiche that leans heavily on Chandler’s legacy, a pothead bowling fanatic and relic of the 1970s who actually calls himself the Dude finds he’s roped into playing private detective after the theft of his favourite rug during the 1990s. Pynchon’s Doc exists in a curious realm somewhere between these two film-based-on-literary protagonists. He lives in nearly the same the milieu of the former while guiding his actions by what feels like virtually the same philosophy as the latter. Unlike either he’s not an anachronism but is rather perfectly in keeping with the spirit of his age, and that spirit and its sticky residue are to a considerable extent the real subject of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s first and, to say the very least, irreverent attempt at the mystery genre. From what I could keep track of in my reading the mystery plot does basically hold together, but it’s gleefully obscured by a tangled web of cultural observation and critique manifesting in near constant digressions. It’s pleasantly meandering, obsessively detailed, probably over-written, at times poetic, and quite often extremely funny. Funny in that zany, busy, baffling, conspiracy-laden, pop culture-crazed Thomas Pynchon kind of way. (If you’ve read him—greatest hits include V. and Gravity’s Rainbow—you know what I mean.)

The elusive Mister Pynchon, circa a hell of a long time ago

Doc covers a lot of ground, not only in Los Angeles but Las Vegas, too. He visits a massage parlour called Chick Planet, where queries about certain sought after figures are responded to with counter-questions such as “Far out. Does he eat pussy?” He patronizes several disparate restaurants where the servers seem always to be warning their customers against eating the food. He visits his cousin Scott Oof, drummer in a band called Beer, and a friend who’s on the verge of discovering the internet in its nascent form. He visits a luxury home with lighting design by James Wong Howe. He gets into a car driven by an insane young woman named Japonica he was once paid to find and is pulled over by cops belonging to a special squad called Cultwatch. He enjoys a rare sighting of the Golden Fang, a schooner that miraculously survived the Halifax Explosion, was later purchased by a blacklisted Hollywood movie star, was later still used for anti-communist activities in the Third World. All the while there is this ongoing tension with regards to Doc’s autonomy—is he picking up clues or simply being led along a path designed by unseen agencies? Of course Doc’s paranoid, but often with reason. He’s a private dick—not a gumshoe but, as one character suggests, a “gumsandal”—and thus a natural outsider, and maybe a pawn of the LAPD, who’ve taken to farming out their dirty work. In any case, Doc’s being perpetually adrift in fogs both literal and figurative is the running joke of Inherent Vice, but it’s also the meat of it. As Endless Summer turns into endless bummer Doc slowly emerges as a lonesome, damaged emblem for a generation whose dreams of fun, freedom, tolerance and respect for privacy, however wishful or misguided they may be, are exploited and finally dashed altogether by the rise of corporate power and ubiquity. Pynchon has a great old time poking fun at Doc’s lifestyle and philosophy, but under all the farce lies a genuine melancholy nostalgia for a time when such dreams could even by conceived.

By the end of Inherent Vice, even mellow old Doc might be getting hardened to the way the tide is turning. “I should trust only good people?” he asks his pal Denis (pronounced, incidentally, to rhyme with penis). “Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.” But Pynchon at least mercilessly leaves Doc in a state of meditative suspension, of unknowingness that’s relatively comfortable, driving in yet another fog, singing along to ‘God Only Knows’ on the radio, with more than a half a tank of gas and an almost full pack of Kools, feeling ready enough for whatever might happen.

Drugs and movies: getting high, coming down, wigging out, and managing the addiction

Is film the most potent art for relaying drug experiences? Its hypnotic, fluid, unprecedented fusion of sound, image, movement and forced perspective certainly feels aligned to some essence of the stream of consciousness, even to dreaming. But where drugs are concerned, I have to wonder if movies don’t get closer to the heart of the matter when they show restraint in how they use their multiform tools and effects.

Once you begin to survey movies that deal in drugs, it becomes clear that the medium’s generally most forceful when it evokes rather than illustrates. When filmmakers attempt to recreate hallucinations, the results are often malnourished or silly. But there are plenty of movies that approach drug states—of mind, body and soul—in thoughtful, inventive or insightful ways. For some reason most of them are American.

Is drug use a distinctly American movie theme? The numbers would have us think so. And there are certain American faces that keep reappearing in drug movies (or at least doing drugs in regular movies): Dennis Hopper, Max Perlich, Chloë Sevigny, Dean Stockwell, Roy Scheider, Keanu Reeves, Peter Fonda, Johnny Depp, William Hurt. Why these actors? Is it something written on their faces, something suspicious etched in their crooked smiles or glassy eyes? I wonder.

It’s these faces, captured in a moment of transition from relative sobriety to relative inebriation, that prompt my richest memories of delving into cinema’s drug state: Scheider’s Joe Gideon in All That Jazz (1979) snorting a line to trigger “Showtime,” Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (86) inhaling some unnamed gas before changing into the scariest babbling stoner in the history of movies. Just thinking about these moments gives me a chill and a thrill.

Movies make a pretty good drug in themselves. The duration changes from film to film, but you can always split if you start tripping out. They can take a while to come down from, but generally cause no hangover. They are, however, potentially addictive, and encompass an impressive variety of experiences and perspectives.

Freaking Out

Some guy on acid attacking a pony-tailed Jack Nicholson with power tools in Psych-Out (68), Rudy Ray Moore flipping out on angel dust at the loopy finale of Avenging Disco Godfather (80), Al Pacino wielding machine guns in Scarface (80), Richard E Grant turning his eyeballs into bulgy little rocks and definitely not staying cool in Withnail & I (87), William Hurt turning into a goddamned goat-eating monkey in Altered States (80): there’s no end to what the movies can tell us about bad trips. Such scenes smear together in my foggy memories of drug movies, but the films as a whole don’t necessarily propose any particular take on the role of drugs in our lives. To do that, it might be best to ease into things, to start with something mellow before digging into the heavy stuff.

Feeling Groovy

If pot is arguably the least harmful of illegal substances, the movies have, over a long period of diminishing hysteria, responded with stories that neither overtly praise nor condemn a pot-smoking lifestyle but rather use it for inspired comedic fodder. In this regard, while it’s not much of a movie overall, How High (2001) has given us one of the most brilliant pot-based premises, with Redman and Method Man smoking their dead friend’s ashes in order to summon up his ghost, who then materializes to help them to ace their entrance exams for Harvard.

A far more esteemed if equally hazy ballad for blunt-smokers is, of course, The Big Lebowski (1998). What lazy bliss is conjured up in the tumbling of tumbleweeds, the gliding of bowling balls, and Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me,” where rock’s most revered wordsmith is never so pleasing as when he just sings “la-la-la-la, la-da-da-da-da-da-da.” No one would mistake Jeff Bridges’ Dude—a guy who lights candles in the bath and splays out in the floor to listen to tapes of old bowling matches—for a go-getter protagonist, yet how much more satisfying that his clumsy apathy actually aids instead of inhibits him in his playing detective.

The Mark Inside

Things get weird fast in drug movies, but they can also prove to resonate as metaphors. In The Addiction (95), the drug is already inside you: it’s blood. Shot in a black and white that seems to saturate the urban grime, Abel Ferrara’s NYC vampire film is a thinly veiled allegory of junkie agony, treating addiction itself like a contagious virus. Everybody in this movie spouts existentialist philosophy: it’s terrifically pretentious, highly body conscious and surprisingly unnerving. Lily Taylor writhes on the floor a long time before pushing the limits of consent in her desperate search for a bloody fix. Christopher Walken, a veteran bloodsucker, shows up to advise her on coming to terms with being undead. He’s in the William S Burroughs role of the wise old junkie —he even cites Naked Lunch.

In fact, the shadow of Burroughs looms over a number of drug films, but none so much as David Cronenberg’s wildly inventive interpretation of Burroughs’s most famous novel. Naked Lunch (91) hasn’t a single recognizable drug in it, but, drawing upon Burroughs’s biography as liberally as from his fiction, it conveys the most complex and harrowing closed circuit of addiction and eternal return in movies. Peter Weller is trapped is a cycle of sexual repression, schizophrenic disassociation, murder and dependency. The sense of unreality is beautifully heightened by the use of soundstages and the refusal to give any physical object a fixed appearance. And as the eloquently staged, chilling final sequence makes clear, the whole thing’s really about the birth of an artist and the devastating price to be paid for one’s muse.

The Palace of Wisdom

Life after drugs is rarely glamorous. Drugstore Cowboy (89) gives us a nice primer right in its opening moments: Matt Dillon, resigned to a new life with no woman and no dope, working in a machine shop, his beatific face calmly recalling how he found himself in the back of this ambulance, while Abbie Lincoln sings “For All We Know” in her strange, staggered cadence and Super 8 reminiscences flicker melancholically on screen. The tone is elegant, eccentric and bittersweet.

Is it any surprise that Burroughs eventually turns up here, too? Seeing the man in the flesh gives Drugstore Cowboy that extra tinge of authority, the slow steady way Burroughs turns in his seat to recognize Dillon, those small but lucid eyes that never seem to change in expression, that insect-like body. Walking with Dillon in the overcast daylight of Portland, Burroughs is an unforgettable presence, and it’s as though Gus Van Sant was suddenly making a documentary.

The Big Picture

Evocatively ungrounded in its floaty animation, A Scanner Darkly (2006) is inspired by that other great voice of authority on dope in American letters. Paranoid and somewhat dysfunctional, Philip K Dick was very likely schizophrenic, yet his troubled mind was still organized and intelligent enough to work as a virtual conduit for a larger phenomenon of collective psychic malaise. Like Cronenberg did with Burroughs, and like Terry Gilliam did with Hunter S Thompson in the supremely drug-addled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Richard Linklater channeled Dick’s spirit as much as he did the source novel in bringing shape and sharpness to A Scanner Darkly, which proposes to reveal the US as a vast drug-pushing machine, thrusting Keanu Reeve’s narc into a maddening house of mirrors, assigned to spy on himself before the drugs in his system finally reach critical mass.

Where movies can take us with regards to drugs now is ambiguous. The subject has been explored from an impressive variety of angles in the last few decades, yet there are as many drug experiences as there are drug-takers, and those who take drugs, whether for transcendence or escape, don’t seem to be diminishing in number. No doubt there will be new stories to tell, new revelations to share, and with any luck, some of them will still sound good after the high has worn off.