Celebrities and performers are easy subjects for films because they personify qualities that many of us desire: affluence, success, and perhaps even fame. At the same time, their shellacked visage is often the creation of another, a doppelganger to themselves, a disguise to generate capital and cultivate a brand. As this visage sometimes cracks, the embryonic person long constrained gestates and breaks forth, exchanging praise to notoriety and glamour shots to mug shots, so why wouldn’t these admired, besought, envied and resented objects be perfect fodder for film? After all, the success driven paparazzi prey give us both someone to root for and despise simultaneously.
However, fictional film adaptations often drop the ball with hyperbolic tropes and an easy routes to self-destruction by using drugs or alcohol as the vehicles. Last year, Crazy Heart gave us a charming alcoholic in Bad Blake, a man on the verge of self-destruction, falling in what might pass as forced love, but destined to fall hard. The only question remaining is whether or not he will pull himself from the dredges or succumb to his vices. As most films in this genre, Blake pulls his boot straps high, realizes he has come close to losing everything, most importantly his life, and redeems himself by going to rehab, emerging as a recovered alcoholic who will channel his heart, soul, and road to recovery into music. Endearing? Yes. And, if it weren’t for Jeff Bridge’s and Maggie Gyllenhall’s performances, Crazy Heart would have little going for it.
And Crazy Heart was clearly seen by Shana Feste, the writer and director of Country Strong, a trailer that I have seen prior to both Black Swan and True Grit, and both times, I can’t help but wonder why these redemption dramas follow the same How-To kit. For example, both the trailer for Crazy Heart (here) and Country Strong have songs that define the main characters, virtually exposing the characters’ successful recoveries.
“The Weary Kind,” the song that plays over Crazy Heart’s trailer exposits, “This ain’t no place for the weary kind. This ain’t no place to lose your mind. Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try,” which directly offers advice to the main character. While it acknowledges his off-kilter personality, it encourages him to give it another go. So, he falls and gets back up.
Likewise, the title song to Country Strong tells us virtually everything about the main character, Kelly Canter: “On the outside, I look fragile, but on the inside, there’s something you can’t take. I’m country strong and hard to break.” In other words, my bleached-blonde looks precarious, but it is reinforced country goodness that won’t crumble under your criticism or my poor judgment. So, she falls and gets back up. Wonderful; however, it’s boring and predictable.
Add to this the common alcohol vice of performers, and you are bound to encounter a scene where the main character is crying with a bottle in proximity. This occurs in the trailer for Country Strong, but only in the theatrical release of Crazy Heart. Both shots involve a close-up of a tear- strewn face of compromised characters: Kelly Canter in her bra and underwear in what looks to be a motel room, attempting to wrestle the bottle from Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), and on a bathroom floor next to a toilet for Bad Blake.
What’s more, they both have alliterative names and are in danger of relinquishing success to young up-and-coming stars: Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrel) in Crazy Heart and Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) in Country Strong. In the same vein, both of these potential usurpers have terribly veiled symbolic names. Tommy Sweet: a first name that invokes youth and vigor, coupled with a surname that is a mirror image of the bitter, broke, old Bad Blake. Perhaps Tommy Goodguy was too obtuse, and Rootforthisguy was too long to print on a credit reel.
Chiles Stanton is a bit better, but the aural similarity between Chiles and “child” suggests that one of the conflicts aside from a conflicted marriage, potential infidelity, alcohol abuse, and a career-in-jeopardy will be the facing of one’s faded glory and Canter’s realization that she’s getting old. (This is quite the melodrama-mélange for a movie that runs at less than two hours.) What’s interesting is that Stanton sounds an awful lot like “stand-in,” perhaps once again alluding to Canter’s resurrected career – as if this isn’t triply suggested in the trailer when Paltrow belts out the title song and then exits stage, walking past Canter, smugly saying, “That’s how it’s done sweetheart.” So, not only does Canter get to relive her youth and piss a final stream of lighter fluid onto a spark of talent, but she also gets to rub it in the face of an eighteen year old. But, isn’t that what success is all about? Stepping on the little people on your way back to the top?
Overall, it’s most likely I will never see this film, and perhaps my anger is a bit misdirected. I shouldn’t bash Paltrow’s comeback in her own career. After closer self-investigation to exorcise my own resent-driven demons, I realize that my anger should actually be aimed at the writer who takes the easy way out and puts together a film that preaches redemption. Honestly, redemption is easy, and it is overdone.
This doesn’t mean that I want to see failure a la Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. That was just depressing that bordered on silly. Really, I want to see the social acceptance of a functional alcoholic. Impossible? Watch Born into This, the Charles Bukowski documentary. Read a book by Kerouac or Hunter Thompson. Sober, straight-shooting fellows? No. Functional abusers who made an indelible mark on American literature? Yes. And despite their faults, they were prolific. They were human.
Movies based on abuse often end one of two ways: an epiphany that leads to redemption and a resurrection of self, or a fall that leaves the subject at the mercy of society, a shredded being dehumanized. Is there a moral message here? Should we all strive to hide our vices? Or, is the message that we should eradicate them? Regardless, both of these tropes are too hyperbolic, and the chiaroscuro would be much more daring and realistic. Why can’t we have a flawed hero, not a redeemed hero showing up a post-pubescent teenager as if they were truly aiming – or being aimed – at the same demographic? Plus, those with no vices on the outside have a murder of them propagating within.
