Sometimes everything comes together in a movie and it becomes something so much greater than the sum of its parts that it can only be described as a miracle. That's the case with Tender Mercies, a quietly luminous character piece about an alcoholic, washed-up country singer named Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall in an Oscar-winning performance) who hits bottom in a motel room one night and then slowly finds his way back into the land of the living with the help of the widow (Tess Harper) and her young son. It's a low-key, contemplative film that feels like a rural American... family comedy in the vein of the great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. Tender Mercies was directed by Australian Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Breaker Morant), written by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird), who won an Oscar for his screenplay, and has an unbeatable cast. This is one of Duvall's most intimate and deeply personal performances, matched only by his debut 14 years later as actor-writer-director in The Apostle. --Jim Emerson [show more]
This breathtaking melodrama is a quite remarkable achievement in American cinema. With its down-home reverence, stifled emotion and expressive minimalism, you'd be forgiven in mistaking this work for being more akin to say, Satyajit Ray and his observations of village life in the likes of Pather Panchali. Tender Mercies is a film about the admirable notion of redemption and self-improvement.
Robert Duvall in arguably his finest and certainly most understated performance plays Mac Sledge, a strung-out former country star who washes up in a remote Texas town. Tender Mercies begins the morning the burnt-out Mac wakes up at rock bottom, his life having become a series of disappointments. The next two hours cover the next year in Sledge's life. Yet, what's remarkable about the story is without going into flashback, in and between scenes, we come to know all about his past, everything of significance that happens to Sledge in that year and in the final scene, we get a clear vision of his future. So there we have it, a man's life, virtually from birth to death, is captured between the start and end of Horton Foote's Oscar-winning screenplay. Incidentally Foote also wrote the screenplay for the almost equally brilliant To Kill a Mockingbird. Tender Mercies is exquisitely plotted through some of the most difficult film terrain of all; a story in which the arc of the film takes place within the mind of the protagonist. Here Mac Sledge experiences a deep and irreversible revolution in his attitude toward life and himself. A filmmaker cannot exactly drive a camera lens through an actor's forehead and photograph his thoughts so what this writer and director team managed to do was lead me, the audience member to interpret the inner life from Mac's outer behaviour without loading the soundtrack with expositional narration or stuffing the mouths of characters with self-explanatory dialogue. Robert Duvall's performance and Horton Foot's script manage to make the mental things so perfectly physical in the simplest yet profoundest of ways. Hence even though redemption stories are ten to the dozen in Hollywood, this one feels heartbreakingly genuine.
Sledge begins the film drowning in the meaninglessness of his life. He appears to be committing slow suicide with alcohol because he no longer believes in anything - neither family, nor work, nor the world he lives in and not even in the hereafter. As the film progresses, there isn't one great overwhelming experience such as success or a great romance or religious inspiration that sweeps change in Mac. Instead what we get is a man weaving together a simple yet meaningful life from the many delicate threads of love, music, and spirit. It's a quiet transformation to try to find a life worth living. Every event is so carefully plotted and what appears as something difficult to achieve and perhaps even as something that could end up as portraiture becomes a film of quiet, relentless power that demands a level of belief, even faith in its characters, a feat few other films dare to suggest, let alone achieve. Here is a character who starts to believe that his reunion with God amongst other efforts, will lead to meaningful changes in his life. For all its simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt film has a story that is universally transferrable to all people for whom faith, love, family and humanity mean something regardless of whether one has these virtues or not. Tender Mercies is riveting, compassionate and touching. Here is a poignant film about the healing powers of love and about changing relationships.
So, to continue the opening of this film, Mac Sledge, an alcoholic, awakes from his drunken stupor in a room, in a rundown motel owned by Rosa Lee played by Tess Harper, a widow whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Without a dime to his name, Mac volunteers to stay on as a handyman and work off his bill. Rosa has a ten-year old son named Sonny who is curious about the wanderer with a guitar and a face that reveals he has seen much of what there is to see in the world. In fact Duvall's ageing face is a road map of dead ends and dry gulches. Although Sonny wants to accept Mac, clearly an outsider, he must first deal with the father he never knew. Sonny turns to Rosa for answers, who in turn wonders what her life would have been like if her husband had lived. Mac stops drinking and finds solace in the slow, isolated and simple existence at the combination gas station and motel. Without much fanfare, Mac and Rosa fall in love and marry, despite Mac having done nothing of any significance to deserve Rosa's care or redemption. This highlights real unconditional love. However it could be argued that by staying on to pay off his bill, when he could have scrammed that Mac has revealed a quality virtue to Rosa. We see no wedding scene or any courtship and this works because the characters are too unlike ordinary people for them to fit into what we've come to expect from clichéd movies depicting the smoochy details of a physical romance. That's the beauty of this film, only showing what you need to know and leaving us to imagine everything else that's off camera vividly. We learn that Mac was married twice, both desultory romances that defined his past. One of his ex wives is Dixie, a very famous Country and Western singer. He had a daughter by Dixie. He lost it all, his career, Dixie and their daughter. Ultimately as Mac sobers up he wants to see his eighteen-year-old daughter Sue Anne against Dixie's wishes who is still bitter with Mac. What follows is Mac's struggle to come to terms with his violent, abusive, selfish past, and old way of living which he tries to reject at every turn, and his attempts to further improve his life, find meaning and worth in his existence, to strengthen his relationship with Rosa Lee and Sonny, to rekindle his music career and to reaffirm his love for his long lost daughter Sue Anne, in the hope of reforming that relationship. Mac is finding a new life, Rosa Lee a new husband, and the boy a new father. It is a story of absent fathers but also of growing together and of hope. The three of them attempt to drive away the shadows of the past in order to become strong in the broken places of their lives. It is Rosa that keeps Mac going and therefore it is through her and the power of fidelity that he has a hope of finding redemption. Rosa is a character who never loses faith despite her own hardships and that is extremely rare to find in life and in films as well.
The country soundtrack to the film, a number of which are brilliantly played and sung by Duvall himself tell a great deal of the film's past and how the character's feel about their lives in the past and present. There is a very brave Christian theme in the film, which connects Mac 's spiritual reconciliation with the divine to the earthly reconciliation with his own child. Despite redemption being the right course of action, the film is even bolder by demonstrating that all relationships cannot be mended with this course of action and that chance and missed opportunities also play a major part in the fate of the characters. There is also a very powerful message about companionship and blood relationship and how the former isn't necessarily any less important than the latter but depends on the circumstance. In this instance, when a young boy asks Sonny if he likes Mac more than his biological father, Sonny says he does since he never knew the other man. There is little doubt that this is also a religious film but in its most positive sense. It uses the virtues of Christianity for the main characters to apply to their daily lives. The Bible clearly appeals to Christians to live out their lives in service to others and Mac does just that by mentoring a young country band who are his fans. He acts as a father figure to them. We also learn that turning to Christianity doesn't necessarily provide greater shelter from the world's tragedies. Everything in Mac's outlook on life doesn't change. He certainly can't trust happiness because it remains inexplicable. But he does start to trust the tender mercies that mysteriously encourage him from death to life.
Robert Duvall's restrained acting in this picture accommodates rage or innocence or any ironic shade in between. He seems to immerse himself into Mac Sledge so completely. Even his Texan gait is acted to perfection. But it's his eyes where most of the work is done. This is the same actor who shouted "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" whilst playing Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now which puts his acting into perspective. Although his character has little to say, he's extremely interesting when he isn't speaking and you are drawn to watch his body language, listen to the notes in his voice, and you end up with that rare character quality where less is elaborated but you learn more. The scene that best sums up Mac's character is when he's asked by a shopkeeper about his past. "Hey, mister, were you really Mac Sledge?" He's friendly enough: "Yes, ma'm, I guess I was." He also didn't see it as important to tell Rosa Lee about his past profession. It was not important to him anymore and not to Rosa who loves him for who he is. That career was another lifetime. All the cast have a down-to-earth quality that sums up everything that's good about America.
The look of the film is entrancing, from a series of disconcertingly flat rural landscapes to the gorgeous photography of human faces - head on, eyes wide, nothing hidden. The cinematography by Russell Boyd has a simple beauty. In several lasting shots, the vast sky dwarfs Mac, Rosa Lee and Sonny, starkly symbolising their isolation, as well as the fragility of human existence.
Tender Mercy may not have a sharply dramatic storyline but it makes up for this with simple clarity of vision. We are left with a life-affirming treasure.
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Bruce Beresford's emotional drama features an Oscar-winning performance by Robert Duvall. When washed-up country singer Mac Sledge (Duvall) wakes up in a Texas motel with a hangover, he has reached the end of the line. With no money and nowhere else to go, he takes a job at the motel run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a kind-hearted widow whose compassion allows Mac to change his ways and turn his life around. After getting married to Rosa, Mac is offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a comeback with his music, but when he meets up with his own disaffected daughter (Ellen Barkin), Mac decides that he can't ruin someone's life ever again, and turns the offer down in order to stay with his new family.
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