for this week’s TRIBUNE : review of ‘Crazy Heart’ [7/10], Rotterdam Film Festival report

Published on: February 20th, 2010

Crazy Heart
Director: Scott Cooper

“JEFF Bridges is 1-5 at best for his role as a broken Country & Western old-timer with a drink problem in Crazy Heart,” wrote the Racing Post‘s Jeremy Chapman in the paper’s Oscar tipping piece earlier this month, “and Hollywood insiders reckon it is ‘his turn’ rather than his greatest performance.” And with all due respect to Bridges’ Academy Award opposition – George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus) and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) – it’s hard to disagree with Mr Chapman’s assessment, or the stingy odds on offer from Messrs Ladbroke, Coral and William Hill.
   And while Crazy Heart, an “indie” picture produced for a very modest $7m and originally intended for TV and DVD, may not be the best movie he’s ever been associated with – that would still be Peter Bogdanovich’s timeless Last Picture Show (1971), followed by Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981) – it’s certainly a heck of a long way from the worst, and infinitely preferable to his most recent big-screen outing in the misbegotten Men Who Stare at Goats.
   Based on a long out-of-print novel by Thomas Cobb – now back on the shelves in what they call a “tie-in edition” in the world of showbiz – it’s written and directed by newcomer Scott Cooper, whom Bridges rather graciously (and generously) describes on his lovely hand-written website (www.jeffbridges.com) as “one of the best directors I ever worked with.”
   The fact that Cobb’s novel was published as long ago as 1987 means that any similarities between the plot and that of Darren Aronofsky’s barnstorming masterpiece The Wrestler - whose heartbreaking lead Mickey Rourke was, let’s not forget, pipped at the post come Oscar-time – are clearly accidental. But they’re hard to shake, as we observe how washed-up country singer Bad Blake (Bridges) finds belated redemption through the love of a good woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal, herself Oscar-nominated as single-mom journalist Jean.)
   True, we’ve seen this story countless times before in various different milieux and guises – it’s even a little corny here and there in some of its more predictable and sentimental moments. But cutting–edge originality isn’t exactly the mother-lode of country-and-western music – and there’s no disgrace in taking an old fiddle and plucking out a nifty, familiar-sounding tune on it. Indeed, as ‘Bad’ remarks at one point, the best C+W songs sound like you’ve already heard them before. Crazy Heart, featuring music by T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton, does include a convincing array of tunes for ‘Bad’ and his sometime protege Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) to perform, the latter enjoying the kind of big-time success that is now only a bittersweet memory for his booze-addled mentor.
   But maybe there are third acts in some American lives, regardless of what F Scott Fitzgerald might have believed, and we observe how ‘Bad’ is inspired by Jean to write what might just be his comeback. The film is thus, in effect, the “biopic” of a song rather than a person – rather appropriate that the “The Weary Kind” has itself earned an Oscar nomination for composers Burnett and Ryan Bingham (not to be confused with the character Clooney plays in Up in the Air, bt the way.) “The Weary Kind” doesn’t sound like much when you first hear it, but it certainly does linger in the memory – just like Crazy Heart, in fact.

JAPANESE ODDBALL SAVES DUTCH FILM-FESTIVAL SHOCK!

The 39th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) took place in the Netherland’s modern port city on the Maas from 27th January to 7th February, presenting well over 200 features and probably just as many shorts. Yes, 200 feature-films, old and news, handily numbered in the festival’s Daily Tiger newspaper each day so that you could ask for details via SMS – from #1 (Turkey’s 10 to 11) all the way down to #239 (Polish drama Zero).
   In my four-and-a-half days at the festival I managed to take in all or part of about 20 features – much less than a tenth of the programme – in an event which prides itself on showcasing the more adventurous, experimental and unusual offerings in current cinema, as well as offering glimpses into the medium’s fascinating past. Overall the consensus was that this year’s IFFR perhaps wasn’t the most satisfying in the festival’s long and proud history – when festival-goers gathered to compare notes, the emphasis was on the turkeys and disasters to be avoided rather than gems to be sought out.
   But with the 40th edition now under preparation, it’s perhaps best to accentuate the positive. And as far as IFFR 2010 goes, that means Matsumoto Hitoshi’s splendid masterpiece Symbol (Shinboru), which I’d actually managed to catch at another festival a couple of weeks beforehand, but which for various technical reasons I didn’t report on for Tribune. Matsumoto is best known in Japan as a television comedian – a bit like a zanier version of Kitano Takeshi, revered as an arthouse auteur in the west but still best known for his small-screen antics back home. His first film Big Man Japan (Dai nipponjin) caused a bit of a splash on the festival-circuit back in 2007, but struck me as overlong and somewhat over-deliberate in its east-Asian craziness.
   Symbol, however, is a quantum leap forward in every respect. Running a brisk 93 minutes compared with Big Man Japan‘s sprawly 113, the first 70 or so alternate between two seemingly-unconnected plot-strands. In one, we follow a washed-up Mexican wrestler preparing for a bout against a much younger opponent – the dusty atmosphere of a semi-rural backwater is pungently evoked. The other story focusses intently on a nameless, pyjama-bedecked, Beatle-moptopped chap in his forties (played by Matsumoto himself) who wakes up in a featureless white room which turns out to hide several prankish secrets.
   How can the two story-strands possibly come together, we wonder – is Matsumoto Matsumoto playing some kind of elaborate game with narrative expectations? It’s only in the last 20 minutes that we get our answer – but that isn’t the end of the matter by any means. In fact, what ensues deserves to be ranked among the most astonishing and brilliant twists in cinema history – forcing us to re-examine everything that’s gone before. Indeed, when Symbol reaches DVD one can imagine delighted and bemused viewers immediately sticking the disc back into the player to enjoy the whole thing again.
   That isn’t an option for cinemagoers, of course – though assiduous IFFR attendees could, with careful planning, take in all three screenings of this headspinningly marvellous, utterly idiosyncratic and unique experience. It may surface in the UK during the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June, but hopefully some intrepid distributor will pick it up and give it the wide release it so eminently deserves.
   For many, the majesty of Symbol made most of Rotterdam’s other offerings seem like very meagre fare. But that’s not to say there weren’t decidedly worthwhile works hidden away in the bewilderingly vast programme. Some were features, including the Danish prison drama R by Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, which covers similar terrain to Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet but in 90 minutes as opposed to 150. Brevity is of course even more important when it comes to shorts, a medium whose Rotterdam highlights included the terrific, justifiably award-winning Condolences (Wei wen) from China’s 32-year-old enfant terrible Ying Liang, plus the impossible-to-remember, tricky-to-pronounce Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor quer ûber den großen Sylter Deich 140 9, by Johann Lurf.
   That ‘pangrammatic’ title – which roughly translates as “Twelve boxers chase Viktor diagonally over the great Sylt dike”- is the German equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” and is a suitably weird moniker for a three-minute movie which consists entirely of 3664 frames from other films, reportedly snipped out by Lurf during his time working as a projectionist. A headlong bombardment of images and sounds, the cheekily larcenous Zwölf Boxkämpfer is as much of a brain-scrambler as Symbol, and perhaps the most potent distillation of the ‘Rotterdam spirit’ at its best.
   At the other end of the sensory scale is the ruminative landscape work of 67-year-old American avant-garde maestro James Benning, recently responsible for 16mm masterpieces such as Ten Skies, 13 Lakes and casting a glance. His belated, eagerly-awaited move to digital video for the 120-minute Ruhr yielded a curate’s egg of an experience, the highlight of which was the opening shot, taken in a road-tunnel with a footpath running alongside.
   Over the course of several minutes we hear – and then see – various vehicles approach, including a thunderous truck. Then a bicycle slips almost silently into shot and out again, its minimal environmental impact in stark contrast to the combustion-engine behemoths that have preceded it. Elegant and hypnotic, Matenastraße tunnel was Benning pretty close to his best – indeed, pound for pound, it was the best new work I saw at Rotterdam, even if Ruhr as a whole (concluding in a single hour-long static-camera shot of a chimney-like coke-works ‘quenching tower’) proved more of an endurance-test than a pleasure.
   In terms of digital documentary, my principal “find” of IFFR 2010 was tucked away in a sidebar celebrating the work of Pompeu Fabra, a Barcelona university best known for business and economics studies, but with a thriving film-school element. 27-year-old Anna Sanmarti’s The Land Inhabited (La terra habitada) takes us on a journey through the wilds of Russia and Mongolia, into the land of the reindeer-riding mountain tribe known as the Tsataa. With minimal dialogue, an impish sense of humour and a superb eye for composition, Sanmarti takes what could have been just another ethnographic travelogue and comes up with something entirely rich and strange, studded with subtle epiphanies from start to finish. Let’s hope next year’s “IFFR XL” finds room for such magical “S” scale enterprises.

Neil Young
8th February 2010
(written for the 17th February edition of Tribune magazine)

CRAZY HEART : [7/10] : USA 2009 : Scott COOPER : 111m (BBFC) : seen at Fox screening-room, London, 14th January 2010 (press show). {18/28}

THE LAND INHABITED : [7/10] : La terra habitada : Spain 2009 : Anna SANMARTI : 71m (IFFR) : seen at Cinerama cinema, Rotterdam, 3rd February (press show). International Film Festival Rotterdam. {18/28}
NB : rating upgraded to 20/28 after second viewing on DVD, March 2010

RUHR : [5/10] : Germany 2009 : James BENNING : 120m (IFFR) : seen at Venster cinema, Rotterdam, 6th February (public show – complimentary ticket). International Film Festival Rotterdam. {14/28}

SYMBOL : [9/10] : Japan 2009 : MATSUMOTO Hitoshi : 93m (TIFF) : seen at Fokus cinema, Tromsø, 23rd January (public show – complimentary ticket). Tromsø International Film Festival. {24/28*}

* rating upgraded to 26 after 2nd viewing, Ljubljana, November 2010