Many Bridges to cross

The knives of President Obama’s critics have pointed from all sides this year. The Tea Partiers and rock-ribbed Republicans will always take their shots, of course, but liberals, too, have given the president more than a little stick-and-move action—people like James Carville and Walter Mondale, Spike Lee and Bob Woodward.

What has happened to Obama, or the Obama we once envisioned, is striking, but even more intriguing is the precarious state this leaves us in as a culture. As Obama fever has turned into Obama fatigue, ours is a Teen Mom-watching, establishment-baiting culture looking for a father—or at least a father figure.

By and large we see ourselves as either Garrett Hedlund’s headstrong Sam Flynn in TRON: Legacy, searching desperately for the patriarch we hope is still alive somewhere, or Hailee Steinfeld’s embittered True Grit teen, looking to someone—anyone—to ease the pain of her real father’s death by taking his place on the ride to reckoning.

Either way, Oscar-winner Jeff Bridges attempts to fill the void of our collective paternal longing this month as the flawed father figure in both of these tentpole spectacles.

Like True Grit, TRON takes place on the frontier. The former rumbles through the wilds of God’s sparsely-settled creation, while the latter does the same through the digital creations of man. Kubrick had a surreal field day with this very juxtaposition in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now the Coen Brothers and Disney take respective aim.

But every frontier begs for someone to lead us across it, and while Bridges is TRON’s guide-in-absentia pulling Hedlund through a black-light nightmare by his absence, he serves as the haggard, whiskey-soaked guide from hell in True Grit. Presence and absence, it would seem, can be equally tumultuous.

In the Coen’s True Grit adaptation, Bridges follows John Wayne as hard-living ex-U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, a rare anti-hero role for which Wayne earned his only Oscar in 1970. Born Marion Robert Morrison, Wayne took on his well-known, all-American moniker early in his career then went on to embody the idyllic Everyman so well that he portrayed characters named “John” in no fewer than 37 movies.

Bridges’ road to the same role featured many more detours, including childhood appearances on his father Lloyd Bridges’ hit series Sea Hunt, his first feature film role in The Last Picture Show, 1970s B-movies like Rancho Deluxe and Somebody Killed Her Husband, and his iconic performances in The Fisher King, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Big Lebowski and last year’s Crazy Heart.

Above all, most of Bridges’ characters shine with empathy. They display an inner calm in the chaos, consistency in the face of uncertainty—even when his inspiration is gone, even when his ideas are dismissed by lies, even when his rug is nowhere to be found. Few qualities are more beneficial to fathers than these.

To co-opt a phrase from The Big Lebowski, the “Dad” abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.

TRON: Legacy opens Dec. 17, and True Grit follows on Dec. 22.