Book vs. Film – Crazy Heart

Every once in a while, I come across a book that makes me think, “Wow, this could be a great movie.” More often, I come across a movie that I enjoyed very much and find out after the fact that it was a book first. When that happens, I tend to wind up disappointed by the book; Thomas Cobb’s Crazy Heart is one of these books.

I first saw the movie when it was released in 2009 and thought it was terrific. Jeff Bridges richly deserved his Oscar for playing Bad Blake, as did Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett for their song, “The Weary Kind.” The film also won some location casting awards, which I had no idea even existed. But these are the three things that make the movie so stellar – and the three things that make me realize just how flat the book is by comparison.

I’ll start with the acting. Jeff Bridges picked up a considerable amount of hardware for his role, and Maggie Gyllenhaal saw a few nominations for playing Jean, Bad’s love interest. Colin Farrell turned out a small but respectable performance as Bad’s protege, Tommy Sweet; Robert Duvall played a version of Wayne that was not in the book, but was a fair compromise for the film.

Bridges was everything you’d expect Bad Blake to be in terms of being a broken down drunk, but on-screen Bad delivers infinitely more charisma than on-paper Bad. Cobb is pretty short on character development, except for a couple of passages that touch on Bad’s childhood and conflicted feelings about faith; these things are absent from the film, but I don’t think that’s much of a loss because they didn’t even feel all that crucial (or even all that well integrated) in the book.

There wasn’t much of a difference between Jean in the book and Jean in the movie, but I would rather watch Maggie Gyllenhaal play the part than try to read the character. This is mostly because, again, Thomas Cobb doesn’t see a need to make his characters really well-rounded people. It’s a huge problem for me because it means that Jean served no other purpose than as an object of Bad’s affection, but in the film, Bad seems to be more interested in playing with Jean’s son than in Jean herself, even if she is limited to the role of lover.

Bad’s relationship with 4-year-old Buddy is complicated by the fact that Bad abandoned his own son when he was that age. In the book, he meets is son but the meeting doesn’t go so well. In the film, that encounter is cut back to one phone call. This is another one of those things that doesn’t seem like a big loss because I couldn’t really get a read on Bad’s emotions in the book, but at least Jeff Bridges was able to  pull a little sadness and confusion – plus some uncertainty over what’s appropriate to feel – out of the situation. I think a deeper exploration of why Bad is so attached to Buddy and how that is colored by his past action of abandoning his wife and son, but this is something I would want more of from both the book (in a more sensitive writer’s hands) and the film.

I have to admit that Colin Farrell’s interpretation of Tommy Sweet is far superior to Cobb’s. In the book, Tommy is an ex-backup musician who hit it big under Bad’s tutelage. He’s enjoyed a pretty lengthy career and has consistently been at the top of the charts. Bad views Tommy’s success as a slap in the face because he likes to tweak songs and make them a little pop-friendly, which is so not country. There was one line in the book that really threw me for a loop, in which Tommy mentions that his daughter is going off to college in the fall.

I’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Maybe this is just because I saw the movie first, but I never saw Tommy Sweet as being old enough to have a college-age child. I didn’t see him as a kid, but it was hard to make sense of Tommy and Bad possibly being close in age (Bad is supposed to be 57). For this, I prefer Farrell’s version of the character, a ruggedly handsome, vaguely 30-something prolific country superstar. There’s a sharper contrast between Tommy and Bad when one is young, sexy, and popular while the other is clearly past his prime. For the two of them to be close enough in age that the younger one has a college-age child gives the impression that Tommy’s waning days probably aren’t too far off. I’m sorry, but he needs to be all virile and studly – basically, the things that Bad isn’t. Those extra things need to be there. Bad needs a reason to resent, if not outright hate Tommy, and it has to cut deeper than, “He’s more popular than I am.”

And then we have Wayne, Bad’s one true friend in the world. Robert Duvall plays him as a crusty old bartender, but Cobb’s original vision for the character is more of a club owner who has more to do with Bad’s career in terms of promotion and providing a venue for hometown gigs. Given how little we actually see of Wayne on-screen, I don’t have a problem with this trimming of the character. He serves his purpose as one of the few stable presences in Bad’s life and that’s just enough.

The one thing I found particularly strange is that for a book about country music, there wasn’t a lot of personal investment in the music. Yes, there were loads of important moments that happened on one concert stage or another, or were tangentially relevant to Bad’s career, but it all felt like technical information rather than artistic. And for this, I say thank God for T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham, who wrote some beautiful songs for the film. They won an Oscar, and a few other awards, for “The Weary Kind,” which really became the emotional centerpiece for the film.

We know all along that Bad hasn’t written a new song in quite some time and has lost interest in writing because he knows the new songs will be snapped up and wrecked by Tommy Sweet, so for him to go through the process of starting something new is a sign of growth. Not entirely redemption, but a step in the right direction. In the book, Bad writes a song called “Is This Going To Hurt Again?” in response to losing Jean; in the film, we’re treated to the earliest little bits of “The Weary Kind.” Without seeing lyrics for “Is This Going To Hurt Again?” it’s hard to tell whether Bad is concerned with how he treated Jean or if he’s looking out for himself. If it’s the latter, Bad hasn’t grown too much as a person because there’s still a selfish motivation, he’s worried about getting hurt without examining how much he’s hurt others. “The Weary Kind” has a more universal feel, like it’s a beacon for anyone who’s felt totally adrift and worn out. It could be Bad, it could be Jean, it could be for anyone in the audience to keep with them.

I mentioned the scenery in the film, mostly because I was surprised to learn that there are awards for location casting. Who knew? But it makes sense, given how much time Bad spends on the road in one shitty motel after another, playing to some grimy bowling alley or piano bar audience. There’s an interesting contrast in the interiors – Bad’s hotel rooms, and even his own home in Houston, are dark and cluttered while Jean’s home is bright and airy. We understand that Bad is happy in Jean’s home when he’s there and we’re set up for the conflicts between the pair; he can adapt himself to fit into her life, sort of, but she constantly has a bad feeling in her bones about trying to fit herself into his.

In the book, there’s no sense of space. We lose the vastness of the Southwest as Bad drives between venues. We lose the aforementioned contrast between Bad and Jean’s living spaces, and by extension, lose some insight into those characters. I am totally sympathetic to the fact that interiors are damn hard to write without getting bogged down in the details, but my biggest gripe about Thomas Cobb is that he isn’t a detail-oriented writer, and his brand of sparseness doesn’t do anything interesting the way Ernest Hemingway’s or Raymond Carver’s does. It feels less like a deliberate stylistic choice and more like a disinterest in or inability to sustain any sort of richness over the course of the novel. And this complaint isn’t limited to the lack of spatial details, it’s something that troubles me about every aspect of the book. It may have been a great screenplay because at least there’s the understanding that the actors and composers and scenery will bring their own strengths to flesh out what’s on paper; as a novel, it’s as sad and flat as a warm soda.