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Saturday, February 27, 2010
Standing in a line that wound around and down the block to the River Oaks Theater in Houston, I had to laugh at myself and the lengths to which I was willing to go in order to see Jeff Bridges disappear into the role of Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. I usually wait until the crowds aren't so big.
I knew that the movie was about a country music singer who is broken-down from too much drinking, too many women and too much hard living on the road of success that had taken him from the good times to the bottom. What I hadn't anticipated was that the movie would touch me so deeply with the power of redemption.
Leaving the theater after the movie, I noticed that the crowd was subdued. People talked quietly as we walked to our cars by yet another long line wound around the block. Perhaps the story touched a nerve with others as it did with me. I knew that I would be turning Crazy Heart over in my mind for a long time.
Parts of the movie were hard to watch and I was disappointed--at first -- that it didn't have the ending I thought it might have, but isn't that like real life?
What I did love was that the movie gave a clear-eyed view of redemption and once I got over my disappointment at the way things ended, I saw clearly that the guy and the girl both were transformed in the grit and grime of recovery and because they had found each other for a moment in time.
Bad Blake reached out to Jean, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, a journalist who saw the man behind the musician. Perhaps he reached out to her as he had to all of the women in his past, hoping that she would save him. And maybe she thought that she could save him. We co-dependents live under that narcisisstic delusion.
In their romance, Jean would find her own redemption. She found her way out of a pattern of co-dependency, but not before she'd repeated her own self-defeating ways and put her child and herself in jeopady. I wanted her to get healthy and I wanted her to find true love, but how that happened didn't fit my happily-ever-after picture.
And Bad? In his roughness and rawness, we got to see in brutal clarity that the power of the lifeforce that pushes us toward wholeness, salvation, sobriety and sanity was miraculously stronger in him than those afflictive forces that made him keep doing the same old destructive things over and over again. Frankly, the moments in the movie when it seemed that Bad would succumb to the downward pull were almost too vivid and ugly for me, but that the bottom was so low made his heroic efforts even more dramatic.
Here's what I learned about redemption from Crazy Heart: Being bought back or brought back from the edge of destruction is possible, but who you are when you come back and how things are may not be like you pictured them to be. In the long run and the short one, we are free to choose our habits, year after wasted year, but we aren't free to choose the results and the outcome of those choices.
As many times as I have quoted the nursery rhyme, I still want Humpty Dumpty put back together again, without any signs of breakage. That nursery rhyme has stood the test of time because it contains a deep, hard truth about life. Redemption doesn't mean that everything can be put back like it was.
Redemption doesn't mean that the people you devastated on your way down to the bottom are going to want to have anything to do with you when you decide to reform. Redemption doesn't mean that you can plant weeds and reap orchids. And redemption doesn't mean that you don't have to deal with the results of your behavior, but it can mean that you have access to a Power greater than yourself that can work for good within the worst situations. As it is said in AA about the program of recovery, "It works if you work it."
Redemption from any addiction, whether to persons, processes or substances, doesn't mean you can re-wind your life, delete the unsavory parts and start over from the beginning, but it does mean that every day from the day you decide to live clean and sober, you can start over again, making decisions from a new place in your heart.
The most poignant part of the movie is not that the guy didn't get his girl or that a younger, hot singer took center stage. The saddest part for me is that Bad Blake didn't get to sing his own song for the crowds.
He got the money for the song, but he didn't get to sing his own song. He got to hear his own song performed for a crowd as he walked away under a brillian blue sky, but he didn't get to sing his own song. He had to listen to the crowds cheer while his song was sung by someone else, and that made me want to cry.
Bad Blake recovered from being bad and decided to live by his real name, and perhaps redemption is all about being brought back home to yourself, and having the courage to be who you really are and go by your real, authentic name. Otis Blake was brought back and bought back, and he had to make a new life. I want to believe that that blue sky and clear sunny day at the end was letting us know that while things weren't going to be exactly as Otis had pictured them, life would be different, better, happier for him. The reality is that we don't get to know the ultimate ending for Otis Blake.
The romantic/idealist/optimist in me wants to believe that Otis Blake went on to write even better hit songs. I want to believe he found the perfect person to share his new life and redemption with him.
And I want to believe that Jeff Bridges will get the Oscar for Best Actor.
That part of me who believes that God is at work in all things, attempting to bring about good, wants to believe that good things come from taking it one day at a time, surrendering our wills and our lives over and over to the care of God, not just as I understand him, but God who is beyond all understanding.
The part of me who believes in redemption truly believes in letting go of my agenda and letting God take the lead in making in this mysterious, mighty act of becoming whole. Some of us call that salvation.
Most of the time, I do believe that, and when I don't, I pray, "I believe; help my unbelief."
Grace happens.
Take it while you can. Take all of it you can hold. And then.....take some more.
And if you want to keep it, give it.
Grace to you--
Jeanie
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