'Crazy Heart': It's in the music--a divine call?

By Allan Roy Andrews

It’s not in the acting; although, Jeff Bridges does an outstanding job portraying a country singer waging a losing battle with fading fame and booze.

             

It’s not in the romance; although, Maggie Gyllenhaal is captivating as the younger lover of the troubled star.

It’s not in the script; although, the story moves intelligently from bowling alley to big stage with lots of foreshadowing in dialogue and drama.

             

It’s not in the booze; although, for a change there’s some deep reality to the hope provided through 12-step  programs, and in the end sobriety trumps a doomed sexual liaison.

             

It’s none of these that make “Crazy Heart” one of the outstanding movies of 2009; it’s in the music!

             

For one thing, Bridges is as admirable a singer as he is an actor, and his renditions of “A Hold on You,” “Fallin’ and Flyin,’” “Brand New Angel,” and snippets of the Academy Award winning song, “The Weary Kind,” mesmerize.

             

It helps to be a fan of country music to enjoy “Crazy Heart,” but the people who put this film together are connoisseurs of the genre.

             

Consider the songs that fill the background and carry Bridges’ staggering performance along its travels from drunkenness to degeneracy to dalliance to dangerous neglect to deliverance:  Buck Owens singing “Hello, Trouble”; the Louvin Brothers singing “My Baby’s Gone”; Kitty Wells singing “Searching”; Waylon Jennings singing “Are You Sure Hank Did It This Way”; Lucinda Williams singing “Joy”; George Jones singing “The Color of the Blues”; the Delmore Brothers singing “I Let a Freight Train Carry Me On”; and in a happy transition scene (a balloon ride symbolic of transcendence), Townes Van Zandt singing “If I Needed You.”  The music of “Crazy Heart” is more than window-dressing; it’s the dynamic driving the script.

             

Bridges’ cry for help:  “I want to be sober,” and the portrayal of his session at a treatment facility should hearten the evangelists of 12-Step programs.

             

In that regard, I believe I detected a lyric change that might credit the emphasis 12-Step programs place on divine intervention.

             

Recovering from drunkenness, Bridges’ character, Bad (Otis) Blake, entertains in his friend’s bar with the song, “Brand New Angel.”

             

I’ve trooped through Web sites seeking the lyrics of this Greg Brown song.  The chorus of which goes:

“Open the gates, welcome him in;

“there’s a brand new angel, 
a brand new angel . . ."

The final line in the versions I searched is given as:

“With an old idea”; or

“With an old violin."

However, if you listen carefully to Jeff Bridges’ film rendition (not the soundtrack cut), the final line is:

             “Who doesn’t know me.”

Can this be God’s call to open the gates?