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Dir. Scott Cooper

Rating: 6.5  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

It's true that unlike Mickey Rourke, Jeff Bridges never really went anywhere -- he's been more or less at the top of his game ever since The China Syndrome -- but in writer/director Scott Cooper's new film, you sort of can't help but feel like he's back from some place. He plays Bad Blake, a grizzled, alcoholic former country music star fallen on hard times, endless binging and playing bowling alleys for peanuts.

Like Rourke's beaten up fighter in last year's indie hit The Wrestler, Blake is at a sort of career crossroads. His former protégé, Tommy Sweet (Collin Farrell, unlikely as that sounds), has become a giant of the industry, selling millions of records with songs penned by Blake. But rather than take Sweet up on his offer to write more songs and get well paid, there's a stubbornness in the man that won't let him descend down the ladder of fame. He'd rather drive his battered Chevy up and down the country and play in dive bars than acknowledge how far down the food chain he's been driven. That is, until he meets what he believes to be his salvation in a pretty journalist, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), whose sweet four-year old son reminds him of his own long-abandoned child.

In many ways, the film plays as a companion piece not only to the aforementioned Wrestler but also all the other films in the down-and-out genre. The best thing about it is Cooper's seeming awareness of that fact. Rather than drawing out a predictable plot and pricking it with pinpoints of melodrama, Cooper follows more of a welcome '70s model, allowing Blake, and the film, to wander around, wallowing in its protagonist's pathos until the formula gets sufficiently watered down. This also allows Bridges, who seems to do his best work with such fraught and fragile characters, the opportunity to dig in deep into Blake's particular kind of self-defeating machinations. He's the kind of man that wants to revel in his downfall, taking awkward pride in the trajectory of his going to seed. "Where are you?" Jean asks him over the phone as Blake is standing in a phone booth, staring off into the bleak prairie before him. "I don't know," he says flatly. "Out in it."

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