The Last American Hero (Lamont Johnson, 1973)

Jeff Bridges and Gary Busey in The Last American Hero

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gary Busey, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ned Beatty, Art Lund, Ed Lauter, William Smith, Gregory Walcott, Tom Ligon, Ernie F. Orsatti, Erica Hagen, Jimmy Murphy, Lane Smith. Screenplay: William Roberts, based on articles by Tom Wolfe. Cinematography: George Silano. Art direction: Laurence G. Paull. Film editing: Robbie Roberts, Tom Rolf. Music: Charles Fox. 

All good actors act with their eyes, but I don't know anyone who is better at acting with the lower half of their face than Jeff Bridges. Which is to the good in The Last American Hero, because a lot of the film consists of Bridges as Junior Jackson behind the wheel of a race car, his eyes covered with goggles and only the thin slit of his mouth and the determined jut of his jaw visible. But Bridges is also called on to suggest desire (mouth softened, jaw less firmly set), defiance (mouth tense, jaw forward), and defeat (mouth downturned, jaw in retreat). This is not to say that the eyes as well as the voice don't come into play. Bridges has a tour de force scene in the middle of the picture when Junior steps into a record-your-voice booth (a fixture made obsolete by, among other things, the cell phone) to compose an oral letter home to his family, each person -- his disapproving mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald), his supportive brother (Gary Busey), and his incarcerated father (Art Lund) -- receiving an appropriate message as the play of emotions is reflected on his face. There's also a lovely aw-shucks moment when Junior, the hillbilly in the flatlands, deals with the desk clerk in a hotel; Bridges never lapses into caricature in the scene. This also seems to say that Bridges dominates the film, which isn't quite true, since the ensemble consists of not only such skilled character players as Fitzgerald, Busey, and Lund, but also Valerie Perrine as Marge, the racing groupie who adds Junior to her list of racing stars she has bedded, Ned Beatty as Junior's first promoter, and Ed Lauter as the promoter who tries to milk Junior of all the cash he can earn. The film's title comes from the profile of racer Junior Johnson that Tom Wolfe wrote for Esquire in 1965, but it feels a bit misleading. There's nothing particularly heroic about Junior Jackson. (The name and many of the biographical details in Wolfe's article were changed, though Johnson himself served as a consultant and technical advisor on the film.) It's less a biopic than an entertaining dip into an American subculture, somewhat glossy in presentation and memorable mostly for its performances. 

Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)

 

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, Barnard Hughes, Dan Shor, Peter Jurasik. Screenplay: Steven Lisberger, Bonnie McBird, Charles S. Haas. Cinematography: Bruce Logan. Production design: Dean Edward Mitzner. Film editing: Jeff Gourson. Music: Wendy Carlos.

Epochal, visionary, pioneering, confusing, migraine-inducing, and occasionally inept. Tron is all those things and more. It would be almost 20 years before movies like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999) would begin to make full cinematic sense of some of Tron's key ideas about the relationship between humans and computers, and we are just now beginning to get seriously antsy about the promise and threat of artificial intelligence. At the time of its release, Tron was mostly discussed as an artifact of the Atari age: the growing popularity of computer games. Not many of us owned personal computers, and the internet was something only techies (and the military) knew anything about. So Steven Lisberger, the creative force behind the movie, has to be hailed as something of a prophet. And Disney has to be praised for a taking a risk (and suffering a loss when the film underperformed at the box office) on a movie as odd as Tron. Even Lisberger wasn't entirely sure that the visual effects he was playing with would work in a feature-length movie. Lisberger also has to be commended for not over-explaining in his film just what he's up to; instead, he plunged his audiences right into the strange world he created. That said, Tron is still sometimes a movie with one foot in chaos, and a lot of it seems to be just the filmmakers "trying stuff out." The acting is sometimes wooden, as if the performers, especially Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan, weren't sure what they were doing. The exceptions are David Warner, who could draw on a long career of playing villains on stage and screen, and Jeff Bridges, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. As for the visuals, not everything works or even makes sense. There are moments of weird beauty, but too often what's meant to be dazzling is merely garish, and a lack of reference points sometimes makes the action incomprehensible. Boxleitner and Bridges have much the same build, so when they're suited up as Tron and Clu it's sometimes hard to tell which is which. (Lisberger originally planned to have them be distinctly different body types, but was unable to follow through in the casting.) Still, time has been kind to Tron, allowing its prophetic essence to prevail over its flaws.

Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard, 2018)

Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at the El Royale

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman. Screenplay: Drew Goddard. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Martin Whist. Film editing: Lisa Lassek. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Giddy, bloody thriller that has been called "Tarantinoesque" for its blend of violence and humor, Bad Times at the El Royale runs too long at 141 minutes, but it has good performances, particularly from Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo, and Chris Hemsworth (shirtless of course) as a sadistic villain. It feels like a cult film that hasn't yet found its cult the way, say, writer-director Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods (2011) did. 

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

Sam Bottoms, Eileen Brennan, and Timothy Bottoms in The Last Picture Show

Sonny Crawford: Timothy Bottoms
Duane Jackson: Jeff Bridges
Jacy Farrow: Cybill Shepherd
Sam the Lion: Ben Johnson
Ruth Popper: Cloris Leachman
Lois Farrow: Ellen Burstyn
Genevieve: Eileen Brennan
Abilene: Clu Gulager
Billy: Sam Bottoms
Charlene Duggs: Sharon Ullrick
Lester Marlow: Randy Quaid
Sheriff: Joe Heathcock
Coach Popper: Bill Thurman
Joe Bob Blanton: Barc Doyle

Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Screenplay: Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich
Based on a novel by Larry McMurtry
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Production design: Polly Platt
Film editing: Donn Cambern

Not having seen The Last Picture Show for a long time, I was startled to realize that the protagonist of the film is Sonny Crawford, played by Timothy Bottoms. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars for the film, Jeff Bridges and Ellen Burstyn were nominees, and Cybill Shepherd and even Randy Quaid went on to more prominent careers than Bottoms did, but his quiet, shyly withdrawn character is the one that carries the movie from beginning to end. The role could have been played by Bridges, but I think director Peter Bogdanovich made the right decision: Bridges is too up-front an actor for the role of Sonny. Bottoms's ability to fade handsomely into the background makes him a perfect actor for a character who needs to be quietly passive. He shouldn't outshine the rest of the ensemble, but instead bring home the film's message about the damage that can be done in a dying community like Anarene, Texas -- an antithesis to the sentimentalized small towns that for so long dominated American movies. What emerges from the starved lives of the citizens of Anarene is not a sense of community, a willingness to love and help one's neighbor, but a kind of deep meanness, a self-righteous self-centeredness. For me, the scene that best captures this emotional and moral stuntedness is the one in which the town goes out in hysterical pursuit of Joe Bob Blanton, the preacher's sun whom we see being bullied and mocked throughout the movie. In our times, I suspect, Joe Bob's revenge would have involved shooting up the local high school, but instead he picks up a little girl and drives off into the country with her, setting off a frenzy. But when he's found and carted off to jail, everyone seems to forget about the little girl: We see her tagging along, virtually unnoticed, after the mob that's rejoicing in its victory. We remember how surprised and disgusted people were when Sam the Lion left Joe Bob a thousand dollars in his will -- probably to tell the boy to get the hell out of Anarene before it's too late. Unfortunately, it seems to be too late for everyone else. Duane goes off to Korea, but he promises to return if he doesn't get shot. Jacy, we hear, is in Dallas, but she'll maintain the carapace of vanity and manipulativeness she evolved in Anarene wherever she goes. At the end, we're left with Sonny and Ruth, reunited in lonely hopelessness.

Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Jeff Bridges, Margaret Bowman, and Gil Birmingham in Hell or High Water

Marcus Hamilton: Jeff Bridges
Toby Howard: Chris Pine
Tanner Howard: Ben Foster
Alberto Parker: Gil Birmingham
Elsie: Dale Dickey
Debbie Howard: Marin Ireland
Jenny Ann: Katy Mixon
Justin Howard: John Paul Howard
T-Bone Waitress: Margaret Bowman

Director: David Mackenzie
Screenplay: Taylor Sheridan
Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens
Production design: Tom Duffield
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Hell or High Water has a resonance in Trumpian America, with its portrayal of a kind of rural desperation that echoes the era of Bonnie and Clyde, when robbing banks was seen as a kind of stick-it-to-the-man activity, a way of getting back at an economic system that allowed no other way of breaking a cycle. As Toby Howard puts it, "I've been poor my whole life, like a disease passing from generation to generation." Toby enlists his ex-con brother, Tanner, in a scheme to rob the small-town branches of the fictional Texas Midland Bank to build up enough cash to pay off the reverse mortgage that threatens the foreclosure of their recently dead mother's ranch, and then to put the property in trust -- with the same bank -- as a guarantee of a better future for Toby's sons. He is, in short, buying off the bank with the bank's money. Given that the Howard brothers have nothing to lose, it's a risk they think worth taking. On the other hand, there is the law to contend with, in the form of Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, just days away from a retirement he dreads. Hamilton, too, has nothing to lose, which means he doesn't mind dragging along his partner, Alberto Parker, on an pursuit that Parker thinks is absurd. It's a film of beautiful performances, not only another laurel for Jeff Bridges, but also a potential career-maker for Ben Foster and a chance for Chris Pine to show that he's not just another pretty face -- he grunges up well. The West Texas setting -- though the film was shot just across the border in eastern New Mexico -- is exploited skillfully, with deft touches like the frequent billboards advertising ways to get out of debt and the moribund small towns that cause Parker to ask, "Do you want to live here? Got an old hardware store that charges twice what Home Depot does, one restaurant with a rattlesnake for a waitress." The film also plays on the Texan love of guns when the robbers discover that the patrons of the banks are taking full advantage of the state's concealed-carry laws. Hamilton also echoes the region's casual racism, perhaps ironically, with his digs at his partner's American Indian heritage, though the point is made without irony when an old man is surprised that the robbers "ain't Mexican." Hell or High Water perhaps doesn't reach the elegiac heights of No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007, but in its simpler, less florid way it's an equally worth companion in the neo-Western genre.