At some point on the road to screen immortality,in between pining for Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show and hurting for Maggie Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart,Jeff Bridges transformed from an all-American pretty boy with effortless charm to a weathered veteran with bottomless soul. It has been a gradual metamorphosis,sweet and bitter and eagerly observed by critics. He is still waiting for the big hit that will finally transform his career, Newsweek declared of Bridges in 1984,upon the release of Starman,in which he played an extraterrestrial. A decade later,and the one after that,he was still waiting. Not that he ever seemed to mind. This is as it should be for a no-sweat star who might now be best known for his turn as the Dude,the middle-age stoner in the Coen brothers 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. His Bridges-ness has been called the Zen-ist of all actors by his friend the musician T Bone Burnett,who helped create the music Bridges performs as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. As Bad,a black-hatted country musician with a booze-pickled liver,he eases into a lovely groove,plucking at pain,strumming self-pity (I used to be somebody/But now I am somebody else),in a turn that has resonated with critics and will probably also play well at the Oscars. Bridges first attracted Oscar attention for his breakout role in The Last Picture Show,Peter Bogdanovichs 1971 elegy about a dying Texas town in the 1950s,only to lose to his co-star Ben Johnson. Bridges was also nominated for best supporting actor for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Contender,and for best actor for Starmanhe lost that one to F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus. Most of his best work,however,has been in smaller,even forgotten titles,like Cutters Way,a 1991 drama about three friends from the director Ivan Passer in which he played Richard Bone,a tarnished golden boy who lives off women and becomes involved in a mystery. Whether by inclination,agent representation,luck or just the fashions of the day,Bridges has largely gravitated away from the heroic. He first shows up in the movies as a baby in a 1951 drama,The Company She Keeps,alongside his brother and their mother,the actress Dorothy Dean. Two decades later he joins movie history as Duane,the bewildered high school football captain of The Last Picture Show,setting the template for a Bridges type who was down on his luck and maybe skimming bottom,at times with a smile that looked far too innocent for an actor who soon made a habit of quietly taking over his films. In the early and mid 1970s he played a wide-eyed boxer,a sly con artist,a moonshiner turned car racer,a squealer turned suicide,a thief and a cattle rustler. Sometimes,just on his own, Pauline Kael wrote of his performance as a stock-car racer in The Last American Hero (1973),Jeff Bridges is enough to make a picture worth seeing. By the late 1980s,Bridges began a run of work that continued into the next decade,making some of the best and most warmly received films of his career. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988),Francis Ford Coppolas frantically upbeat stealth tragedy about the eponymous 1940s automaker,earned the director and his star critical love. The romancing continued with The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989),Steve Kloves appealing romantic standard about lounge musicians that brought the Bridges brothers together for an emotional menage a trois with Michelle Pfeiffer. Then came Terry Gilliams Fisher King (1991),in which Bridges,as a shock jock,held off the nattering inundations of Robin Williams,and Fearless,Peter Weirs 1993 psychodrama in which Bridges plays an architect who catches a case of grandiosity after a plane crash. Whatever their merits,these titles resonate less memorably,then as now,than the pair that bracketed the decade,starting with Martin Bells unassuming drama American Heart (1993),in which Bridges,as an ex-con struggling to be the father he never had,has rarely looked more beautiful or been more devastatingly touching. The second film was,of course,The Big Lebowski,the blissful comedy that,after being dismissed by critics on its release,has materialised into a cult phenomenon,celebrated in an annual event called Lebowski Fest and consecrated by the predictable academic studies. By facing every assaultrepeated beatings,a friends death,the theft of a rugwith little more than an exclamation,the Dude affirmed that an American hero doesnt need a punch,just a punch line. It takes nothing away from his work in Crazy Heart to note that the films success and profile probably owe something to Iron Man,the 2008 blockbuster in which he played the villain and which gave him his highest-profile role in years. He was hilarious,absurd,necessary,and to watch him in that movie as well as in Crazy Heart is to be reminded yet again of how he abides.
