Country
singer Bad Blake was a great star once but now he had reached the bottom.
Another
great musical biopic, the only difference this time is that this is all
fiction, there is no real musician here, Bad Blake is a creation of pure
imagination.
Now this is
not really as bad as it sounds. The musical biopic, even when is firmly anchored
to reality, was already an heavily stylized genre. They all share the same
structure, in many case they even use the same shots so actually going for the
fictious, gives the story a chance to be innovative.
We don’t
actually follow Bad Blake whole life story, we see only a couple of years of
his life and without the need to cramp a whole life story events flow so much
better. We have a feeling of what his life was, of his many wives, of his estranged
child, but we never see any of them.
Of course
all of this would never have worked if the actor playing Bad Blake wasn’t able
to pull it off, but then they got Jeff Bridges who actually manages a performance
good even for his standards, which are really high already to start with.
He
literally inhabits Bad Blake, he sings and plays his songs, he shows the
various stages of alcohol intoxication with subtle, and less subtle, signs. In
many moments we clearly see what’s going on in Bad Blake mind without him
telling us.
He won an Oscar
for this part and, in my book, he clearly deserved it.
The ending
is a little underwhelming, certainly not depressing as it could be but probably
years of Hollywood endings left us a little bit spoiled. Anyway this is a
recommended viewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment