2-11-10 Movie Reviews: Blind Side and Crazy Heart

Two noncommercial movies showing between now and next Wednesday night, one tonight and one tomorrow.

Tonight offers the first of the series of black movies Tallgrass is showing in connection with the Gordan Parks exhibit at the Ulrich Museum on the WSU campus. It's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, from 1973, with Kevin Willmott of the University of Kansas answering questions; The Spook Who Sat by the Door, as many white businessmen made sure one did during the civil rights movement of the seventies, tells of a black nationalist who joined the CIA and learned guerrilla fighting, and then founded Freedom Fighters, a quite different organization working for the rights of American blacks. The movie just barely got released in 1973, but is coming out on DVD now. Showing is 6 p.m. tonight in McKnight Art Center at WSU.

Tomorrow night at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway offers Les Diaboliques, the original French version, from 1955, a mixture of horror and whodunit and general human worthlessness written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of the classic French directors of thrillers, starring Simone Signoret. This is not to be confused with the American remake starring Sharon Stone. 7:30 tomorrow, Murdock Theatre, Les Diaboliques.

And commercially, we have two movies made unusually worth seeing for their lead performances, and in one case not much else.

Sandra Bullock is more than worth your time and money in The Blind Side, but you have to accept that a wealthy white family with two school-age children can take a black youth into their home with no sibling rivalry resulting, only a bare mention by the teenage daughter at school, Bullock's abandonment of her three lunch friends, but no other social consequences, and no problems with the father at work, all in Tennessee in the days before the South was fully adapted to the civil rights issue; you also have to accept a black boy being abandoned by his drug-addled mother and deserted by his father and living on the streets with virtually no psychological damage. Without Bullock, The Blind Side wouldn't have much to offer but dreamland.

But Crazy Heart has two first-rate performances and country music, and it's a picture of the real world.

Jeff Bridges is great as the beat-up old country singer who once was top stuff but now plays in bowling alleys, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is almost as good as the young mother who may or may not love him but certainly loves her four-year-old son, and she has obligations to him. Crazy Heart takes into account the damage life experiences can do to a person, and doesn't ask you to turn off your sense of reality. Even the four-year-old is a real four-year-old, though he is nowhere near as much fun as the nine-year-old in The Blind Side.

The Kansas City Star review in the Eagle was dead on target in suggesting that Crazy Heart is The Wrestler with country music. Jeff Bridges has only touches of his usual charm, because Bad Bates has drunk away most his better qualities and has yet to accept that his old partner, Colin Farrell, deserved to stay at the top partly because he had the sense not to let Bridges drag him down. And he has to learn the Gyllenhaal may have to show the same good sense; like Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, she has a child to consider. Crazy Heart does not surrender to romance, and will not let its characters do so. Yet is sees the basic goodness in Bridges as The Wrestler did in Mickey Rourke. But loveableness, and even love, is not all that matters, in movies for grownup audiences. I only wish Sandra Bullock was as good as she is, in another grownup movie.