I’ve seen a few films in recent weeks – Up in the Air, Avatar, Me and Orson Welles, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee – all interesting in their own way. But, for some reason, Crazy Heart is the one I feel compelled to write about. Maybe its cause of that word “heart” in the title.
I’ve been a Jeff Bridges fan for a long, long time. I have a treasured memory of the first time I saw him, in Hearts of the West, in 1975. It’s not a profound film, but very sweet and engaging, the kind you can’t help but like despite its flaws. And the young Jeff Bridges had such freshness in it, such delightedness, like a galumphing puppy dog.
Then I saw Cutter’s Way, then Fat City and, of course, The Last Picture Show. Later came The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King and American Heart. Along with so many others. That’s the thing about him – he has given us so much to choose from. And he so rarely disappoints. If ever. I can’t think of a single time.
So now he’s dishing it up again in Crazy Heart. (He does a lot of films with that word “heart” in the title, but then he has also done a few “Last of This” and “Last of Thats,” not to mention all those “Americas” and “Americans.” Maybe someday we’ll see a culminating work from him called “The Last American Heart,” a sort of “Citizen Kane” for our current age of cold corporate control.)
I had read beforehand a mini-review in which the film was referred to as “The Wrestler meets Country and Western,” which gave me a slight feeling of dread. With a lesser actor than he, I may well have skipped it. Who needs to see another tale of slow agonizing decline and death? Mickey Rourke already did it about as perfectly as can be done. So they added a few country music songs. So what? But I can’t pass up a Jeff Bridges starrer (especially one with that word “heart” in the title).
So I went, and I watched, and I couldn’t help noting all the Wrestler parallels. The down and out legend, the reverent fans, the alluring woman who is also a mother, the waking up alone in a hospital bed, the ominous warning from a doctor, the attempt to reconcile with an alienated child, the eventual loss of the woman. But at a certain point, to my relief, I knew that this story would have a different ending. There was a little less loneliness in it. A little more hope. He, at least, had an agent on his side, and a protégé-made-good who wanted to work together again. And the woman he was after was interested in him, too.
In fact, Bad Blake had a lot more going for him than Randy “The Ram” Robinson. “So what’s his problem?” I wondered, as I watched him throw back one McClure’s whiskey after another. Then a new sense of dread came over me. “Oh, no, don’t tell me! It’s an addiction story! Ugh, now I know exactly how it’s going to end.”
See, stories about alcoholics and drug addicts can only end in one of two ways – the abuser either hits bottom and gets better or . . . he dies. Because, see, addiction is a disease. And not only is it the nature of disease that you either get better or you die but any given disease has essentially only one course of progression. Like when you get the chicken pox – first you get a fever, then you feel fluish, then little red dots appear, then they itch, then you think you’ll go insane, then the blisters burst and crust over and then you get better. This is how it goes in everyone.
So with addiction – first the substance is used socially, then recreationally, then compulsively, then obsessively, then exclusively and then disastrously. The individual in its grip goes down, down, down, compromising – or losing altogether – friends, family, job, school, home until either the body succumbs or the consciousness is finally jolted back to life.
This is why I have always cautioned students against trying to write an addiction story – because it’s bound to come across as generic. In fact, the desire to tell the truth about addiction is almost at odds with the desire to portray individual character growth. The whole point is that it’s generic. It’s not about the individual. It’s about the disease, which is the same for everyone. The underlying character isn’t going to get anywhere until the addiction is gotten past. So we end up with a well-intentioned but bland film that reads more like a textbook description of a diagnosis than an individual human drama.
Thus, my sinking feeling in the middle of Crazy Heart. But I hung in with it. And, once again, my old pal Jeff did not disappoint me.
Hmm. The film brazenly defies the advice I’ve been giving my students all these years. But I didn’t leave the theater with that feeling of having been spoon fed an over-responsible and earnest portrayal of a syndrome. How did it do that?
In exploring that question, first let me address the fact that, dramatically speaking, and according to precedent, it’s easier to pull off an alcoholic/drug addict story in which the subject succumbs in the end than a story of uplifting recovery. Long Day’s Journey Into Night comes to mind. While the morphine-addicted Mary doesn’t die, there is little doubt left that she will never recover from her addiction and, thus, is certainly on a downward slide to her death. But in the process, an awful lot of truth is revealed about how a family can systematically destroy itself. No one had explored addiction so thoroughly before this play so it immediately became the standard bearer on the subject. And it gave little hope for recovery. But then, little was known at the time about the possibilities for recovery.
In the 1980s, on the heels of Betty Ford’s recovery in 1978 and founding of her rehab center in 1982, addiction recovery hit the media. But addiction had a lot to live down – Bowery bums, ghetto drug pushers and the notion promulgated by the Temperance Movement that alcoholics must “reform.” Understandably, the Recovery Movement had to actively promote the disease model. An unfortunate side effect was a spate of well-intentioned Movie of the Week dramas full of generic characters.
No doubt contributing to this tendency was the Alcoholics Anonymous ethic of anonymity, which tells those in recovery not only do they have the right not to volunteer their identity but they are also free to tell anyone who’s asking, “None of your god-damned business.” So exactly whose story are we telling in this Movie of the Week about an alcoholic? None of your god-damned business! But, as Eugene O’Neill so effectively demonstrated, the best source of compelling, truth-telling drama is in very deep, ruthless mining of one’s own personal experience. For our purposes as dramatists, the preservation of anonymity and the mining of deep human truths, while not complete strangers to each other, are nonetheless unproductive bedfellows. They create generic babies.
Crazy Heart didn’t have any generic babies in it. It very much left the feeling that somebody had ruthlessly mined their deep personal truth. Certainly, Jeff Bridges did in order to come up with that performance. But there also had to be a lot of personal truth already showing up in the script. Yet, prowling around the internet for information on book author Thomas Cobb and writer-director Scott Cooper, I found no revelations of experience with addiction. Too bad.
Maybe they’re subscribing to that none-of-your god-damned-business view. Okay, they’re entitled. So, if no one else is going to share, I’ll say a little something about how I learned an important lesson of storytelling.
I went through a period, back in my late 20s, of attending 12-step meetings when I was coming to terms with my mother’s drinking. Every meeting began with one person sitting in front of the room and telling their story of growing up in an alcoholic household. While I was terrified of telling my own story, I found these stories of others’ riveting.
It was in this context that I came to learn the truth of the phrase, “the more personal it is, the more universal it becomes.” I’d, of course, heard it said many times while studying screenwriting in film school. But the meaning was abstract. Here, I saw people pour their guts out, in the most intimate and inimitable detail, and the rest of the room, far from nodding off in boredom or screaming in horror and running out the door, would simply nod and sigh knowingly.
When it finally came my turn to be at the front of the room, my own story of growing up with refined John Cheever-like suburban tippling felt so lame compared to some of the high drama that headlined on other nights. But the gathered assembly simply nodded and sighed for me as knowingly as they did for everyone else. A few even thanked me later. Thus, demonstrating to me that it didn’t matter what my story was, so long as it was my very personal and unique story. In a confounding paradox, the more specifically I told it, the more thoroughly they were able to see themselves in it.
Walking out of the theater after Crazy Heart, I did a mental assessment of the impression the film left on me and realized that it reminded me of the testimonies I used to hear back in those meetings. It had that feel of someone chronicling their downward descent, with ruthless soul-searching honesty, revealing all their misdeeds and humiliations along the way. And in so doing, it was riveting. As I used to do back then, I was leaning forward in my seat so as not to miss a word.
And the happy ending? Well, as with any happy ending, the degree to which we can accept it is directly related to the degree to which the character had to work for it along the way. And the amount of hell the character had to go through. That’s what justifies and supports a happy ending. So Bad Blake’s happy recovery is supported by how low – how very low – we saw him fall before he hit his own personal bottom with a resounding thud.
But, of course, the ending of Crazy Heart isn’t entirely happy. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but he loses something big in the process of gaining his sobriety. This is what makes the story individual. That was the path he had to follow to get there.
The universal part is the compulsion towards self-destructiveness. We have all felt that compulsion in ourselves at some point in our lives. Maybe we have acted on it. We have certainly feared our potential to act on it. That is what the film is expressing for us.
This brings us back to The Wrestler, in which self-destructiveness is not only a way of life, it’s a professional calling. Despite it’s literal title, The Wrestler is not a literal story of substance abuse. The alcohol use is rather down played in it. Instead, it’s a metaphor for a self-destructive path. Crazy Heart, on the other hand, despite it’s metaphoric title, is not. It is a literal chronicling of a very personal testimony. From somebody. I don’t know who.