Jeff Bridges gives a compelling performance as a washed-out country and western singer in Crazy Heart

Mar 5 2010 Liverpool Daily Post

CRAZY HEART (15) Rating: lll

JEFF BRIDGES seems destined, undeservedly, to win the Academy Award as Best Actor In A Leading Role for his turn as a washed up country and western singer, who lives by the bottle.

Written and directed by Scott Hooper, Crazy Heart is this year’s The Wrestler, following a self-destructive has-been on the slow and painful road to redemption.

Bridges’s character brings suffering upon himself and the people around him, and, in one of the film’s pivotal sequences, he manages to lose a young child in his care because he is tempted by the promise of a cheeky afternoon drink.

At 57 and still touring rundown motels, Bad Blake (Bridges) is a shadow of his former self.

Yet, through an unlikely romance with newspaper reporter Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), we are able to glimpse the tenderness and sadness in this pitiful man.