Where humor and pathos abound

MANILA, Philippines - Nominated for three Academy awards including Best Actor, Fox Searchlight’s critically acclaimed drama Crazy Heart opens exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4, Greenbelt 3 and Trinoma) starting tomorrow, March 3.

The film stars Jeff Bridges as the richly comic, semi-tragic romantic anti-hero Bad Blake — a broken-down, hard-living country music singer who has had way too many marriages, far too many years on the road and one too many drinks way too many times.

And yet, Bad can’t help but reach for salvation with the help of Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist who discovers the real man behind the musician. As he struggles down the road of redemption, Bad learns the hard way just how tough life can be on one man’s crazy heart.

The debut feature of writer-director Scott Cooper, Crazy Heart is based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb. Like a sly and tender country song, laced with equal parts passion, humor and trouble, Crazy Heart is the portrait of a man who has lived hard, fast and recklessly, but still goes after the salvation of love when his heart gets what appears to be one last chance to redeem itself.

Scott — himself a Southerner steeped in the rollicking legends and bittersweet themes of country music — always saw the outsized lead character Bad Blake as a mirror of the country heroes he grew up idolizing, in spite of their wildly unpredictable love lives and battles with their darker impulses. Bad might indeed have a “bad” streak — he can be as ornery, irresponsible, intoxicated and ridiculous as they come — but he is equally a gifted storyteller, an unsinkable romantic, a soul in need, and a man who finally proves himself willing to chase after redemption when all seems lost.

The character certainly carried a kick and abounded with potential, but as he sat down to write, Cooper faced the task of translating Bad’s mix of humor and sorrow into something that would feel resonant and exhilarating on screen, that would come across as funny and honest and that might illuminate in equal parts the sheer exuberance of his musical talent and the tough-to-escape lure of his demons.

In many ways, it came naturally to Cooper. “I grew up with this type of music, living in the same type of world that Bad lives in. And being an actor myself, I understood the nature of a performance-driven story. I felt like if I couldn’t do this, having grown up in the South, steeped in country rock, working as an actor, I was in trouble,” he laughs.

Cooper let the character and the rich ironies of his almost-famous, perilously-conducted life guide the way. “What I really wanted to capture was the mixture of humor and pathos in Bad’s life, and inject it with levity,” he explains. “Bad is an old dog who doesn’t know if he has any new tricks, a man who will always go through peaks and valleys but his story moves, in spite of that, towards redemption.”

The urge to change is sparked in Bad by one of the sweetest romances he’s ever encountered — and here, too, Cooper wanted to evoke all the real and wild contradictions of relationships — the heat and the electricity that make those first moments of love so thrilling and the ways we still can find ourselves doing wrong by those we care about the most no matter how powerful the feelings.