Jeff Bridges, the “Role of His Career””

Crazy Heart is getting great reviews, though they focus mainly on the strong performance at the center. Kenneth Turan at the LA Times writes:

There’s a powerful symmetry at work in “Crazy Heart” that’s impossible to resist. It’s a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer whose entire life has led him to a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers just in time to make Mr. Blake the capstone role of his career.

It’s a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular culture staple (Rip Torn in “Payday,” Robert Duvall in “Tender Mercies,” Hank Williams and Merle Haggard in their own lives) for forever.

No Jeff Bridges performance, however, ends up looking anything like familiar. With dozens of roles — as well as four Oscar nominations (a fifth for this one is a lock) — behind him in a nearly 40-year career, he has a deep understanding that great acting is not self-conscious but a result of seamless transformation into someone else.

The NY Times’ AO Scott:

Some of Mr. Bridges’s peers may have burned more intensely in their prime, but very few American actors over the past 35 years have flickered and smoldered with such craft and resilience. Neither blandly likable nor operatically emotional, this actor has a sly kind of charisma and a casual intelligence. You suspect that he may be smarter than some of the characters he plays — the lounge musician in “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” the deadbeat bowler in “The Big Lebowski,” the egotistical author in “The Door in the Floor,” to take just a few examples — but also that he knows every corner and shadow of each one’s mind.

The Rolling Stone’s Pete Travers:

It’s a juicy, career-crowning role, and Bridges ‚Äî a master of subtle brilliance ‚Äî plays the hell out of it. Not by showing off but by going bone-deep into a character who only thinks he’s running on empty. Bridges just turned 60, and he’s still the most underrated actor in America. Crazy Heart may finally win him the Oscar that’s unfairly eluded him from his promising youth in The Last Picture Show to the glory days of The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, Starman, Fearless, The Door in the Floor, and his immortal Dude in The Big Lebowski, from the brothers Coen. I could go on. Let’s just say that Crazy Heart offers the pleasure of watching a great actor at the peak of his form.

Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek:

Maybe there’s a clich√©, or at least a degree of truck-stop-Romeo calculation, buried in that seduction line. But as Bridges says it, that’s not what it’s about: For him, the line is a spontaneous leap of poetry, a strange and slightly awkward sentence that doesn’t even have the shelter and the protection of a song around it. Bridges is one of those acknowledged great actors who’s been praised so often that we’re almost sick of hearing it. But his performance in “Crazy Heart,” for my money the finest male performance of the year, reels us right back to understanding why: Instead of dressing up words, he sends them out naked. It’s everything he subtracts that matters.