One From the Heart
Jeff Bridges shines as a country-music has-been. Will the elusive Oscar finally be his?
Enticing Jeff Bridges to voice a washed-up surfer dude in the 2007 childrenNs movie SurfNs Up, the filmmakers sent the actor a video of an animated penguin declaiming a few of his lines from The Big Lebowski. They probably didnNt need to work that hard: An avid surfer, Bridges has dropped in and out of Dudeville many times in his 40-year career. But the preternaturally good-humored actor relished the joke almost as much as he enjoys playing occasional gigs with his band in, as he puts it with some bemusement, “a sea of dudes” at Lebowski festivals.
Playing big lugs began for the handsome Bridges with his turn as the dimly bulbed, duck-tailed young Apollo who so ineptly deflowers Cybill Shepherd, then offers himself as Vietnam cannon fodder in The Last Picture Show (1971). Earlier this year, he played a tripped-out army poobah in Grant HeslovNs The Men Who Stare at Goats. But the movie thatNs inspiring chatter about the Best Actor award that has inexplicably eluded Bridges through four Oscar nominations is Crazy Heart, a modestly budgeted new indie by first-time director Scott Cooper, in which the actor, who plays a burned-out country-music star ripe for either salvation or damnation, sings his own numbers.
Bridges, who turned 60 last week and can slump his lithe linebacker build into lumpish inertia as needed, is an intensely physical presence who leads with his body in a way that often obscures the emotional intelligence he lends his characters—a gallery of American manhood in all its compromised, destroyed or hopeful ambiguity. In Seabiscuit, Tucker and The Contender, Bridges brought his relaxed charm to bear on expansive, optimistic visions of American leadership, just as he expertly curdled that charm into villainy in Jagged Edge and Iron Man.
For my money, though, his best roles have been damaged men who subtly suggest the range of their potential, for better and worse. He was a wayward slacker who suddenly took matters into his own hands in 1981Ns little-seen CutterNs Way,and he was appallingly persuasive in The Door In the Floor (2004) as a man incapable of acknowledging his grief over the loss of a child. In between, he was heartstopping in Martin BellNs American Heart (1992) as a paroled bank robber, failed by his parents and now set to fail his own son. Bridges could be that same man—a couple of decades on—in Crazy Heart, as the drunken, clapped-out singer Bad Blake trying, in some small corner of himself, to be good.
Onscreen, Bridges makes it all look easy. In person, heNs affable and courtly, but he admits that even deciding whether to accept a role is torture. Over lunch at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, he recounts a dream he once had: “I was going down a very wide river with big cliffs on the other side,” he says. “Scattered throughout this river were huge whirlpools, and my task was to navigate through them. At the vortex of each whirlpool was a beautiful jewel, and INd get mesmerized for a second and go, ‘Oh, oh, I almost got caught.N INd go on, and the same thing would happen.” Bridges, who draws, takes photos and does ceramics between acting gigs, turned that dream into a painting titled Jeff Makes a Decision. “ThatNs my process,” he says with a self-amused laugh. “Once you say yes to a movie, youNre automatically saying no to all the other beautiful jewels.”
Once heNs committed, fear sets in. “The dude side of me doesnNt like to be challenged, you know? At the same time, itNs what I respond to,” he says, recalling being overcome with awe upon seeing the great Robert RyanNs sweaty palms on the set of John FrankenheimerNs The Iceman Cometh (1973), a gig that Bridges turned down until a colleague yelled at him for being an idiot. “Talk about fear!” says Bridges. “I asked Ryan, ‘After all these years?N And he said, ‘Yes. INd really be scared if I wasnNt scared. DonNt try to get rid of that thing.N So I had a wonderful time making that movie, and after that, I said, ‘I can do this for the rest of my life.N”
“The ones I end up doing are the ones I just canNt refuse,” says Bridges. “And that has served me well.” He tried to avoid Crazy Heart for a while. “What distracted me was that it was about music, which I love. But there was no music attached to it. About a year later, my friend [music producer] T-Bone Burnett—we go back 30 years to HeavenNs Gate—who also had the script, said, ‘Yeah, letNs do it.N So we started to get excited. It was definitely one I couldnNt say no to. The jewel was too gorgeous.”
Crazy Heart is a promising first feature for Cooper (himself an actor), but Bridges enlarges, in every sense, the movieNs familiar territory of self-destructive celebrity. “When heNs onstage, thatNs his home. ThatNs a typical thing with performers like that: Once they get to success, they start to abuse themselves,” says Bridges, who spends a lot of time around musicians, all of whom he fondly calls his dear friends. (Cooper had originally wanted to base the movie on the life of Merle Haggard, says Bridges. “But Merle had been married five or six times, so it was hard to get the rights through all his wives.”) Wading with his usual abandon and an exposed big gut into the defiant self-immolation of Bad Blake, Bridges makes room for an open destiny for this mumbling wreck of a man, craning his neck forward as if interrogating the world for whatever crumbs of insight or salvation it might spare him.
Bridges comes from Hollywood royalty. His father, Lloyd, who starred in the television series Sea Hunt, and his brother Beau, eight years older than Jeff (they played lounge singers together opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys), both encouraged and shaped him. But heNs always lived in the shadow of nepotism, which may account for his chronic ambivalence, as well as explain why his career has skittered between big studio movies and small indies. It says a lot about the actor that his all-time favorite movie is Citizen Kane (about another flawed giant) but his current favorite is Once, a romantic Irish indie from a few years back whose music all but takes the place of dialogue.
As the N00s come to a close, Bridges wonders whether it has always been this hard “for an old guy to get a job” in the industry. Yet he will follow in John WayneNs footsteps as the iconic Rooster Cogburn in the Coen BrothersN remake of True Grit, scheduled for release in 2011, and heNs in post-production on a sequel to the 1982 sci-fi thriller Tron. About the Oscar buzz, he says modestly, “Any time you get acknowledged by the guys who do what you do, thatNs pretty good, right?”
Mostly, though, Bridges comes off as a man slightly bewildered by his own good fortune. “I have my favorite possession in my pocket,” he says, pulling out a dog-eared old photo of a lovely young woman. Her name is Susan Geston, and she was working her way through college as a maid near the Montana set where Bridges was shooting Rancho Deluxe in 1974. In the photo, which someone who worked on the set sent him a few years ago, sheNs smiling, but, Bridges explains, she was turning down his request for a date. TheyNve been married for 35 years.
Crazy Heart is currently playing in select theaters. Read our review, “Misery and Gin” (Dec. 17).
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.