Fox Searchlight isn't wasting any time getting over its slumpy fall trifecta of Whip It, Amelia and Gentlemen Broncos, choosing instead to play its ace in the Oscar hole with next month's Crazy Heart. A few strategic early screenings resulted in exactly the buzz the studio intended for Best Actor hopeful Jeff Bridges, and now the film's trailer reveals to the rest of us a few slivers of the folksy woe and redemption that the Academy is likely to reward next spring.
It would be one thing if no one had yet seen Crazy Heart, and the trailer merely teased the performance to come. But from the first look at Bridges as Bad Blake, a burned-out country music star with a long, aromatic vapor trail of booze, drugs, ex-wives and squandered fortunes, it's clear that were getting a rangy, dignified complement to early blogger chatter. Bridges (er, make that "Four-time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges in the performance of a lifetime," as per the trailer copy) himself staggers and swaggers through the drill, kind of an alternate-universe Lebowski for whom slumming is more of an unhappy accident and the only person out to find him is a sexy young reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who knows he's capable of more than bar-band entropy.
The rest pretty much speaks for itself. Robert Duvall (who mined Oscar gold with a similar character 25 years ago in Tender Mercies) makes an appearance as what appears to be a barkeep with a mentor streak, and a young child in the back of a departing cab portends single mom Gyllenhaal's own personal crisis. Bad Blake even rolls his pickup truck off a dirt road. Is everything OK? If Bridges' epigram "It's good to be home" is any indication, it's more than OK. It's for your consideration.
VERDICT: Just give him the damn Oscar already.
ยท Crazy Heart [Trailer Addict]