Tender Mercies (1983)

Wonderful!

This is a film where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. It is well written, cast, acted and directed, yet the overall final product is one of the best "quiet" films ever. I'm not a country music fan, but the music is perfectly in context with the story and one compliments the other extremely well. This may be Robert Duvall's finest work. I think if it came out in 2008 it would contend for Best Picture honors. May 2, 2008

Good story!

This is about a man who loves his wife. And it's about a wife who loves her husband. Sorta nice, right? December 2, 2007

Great "small' movie

Tender Mercies (1983); Directed: Bruce Beresford

With: Robert Duval as Mac Sledge, Betty Buckley as Dixie, Tess Harper as Rosa Lee, Ellen Barkin as Sue Anne, Allan Hubbard as Sonny

I had neglected to see this fine movie for a long time, and thanks to my cable service, I re-watched it last night without the aid of DVD and with no commercials, and wish to say a few things in its praise.
First and foremost let me express my admiration for Robert Duval, a character actor (but not one here) who has managed to bring to the screen memorable villains (for the most part): his cold-blooded and designing consigliore in Godfather (One and Two), the paranoid officer in Apocalypse Now where he wipes out a Vietnamese village in a helicopter attack to the tunes of Wagner, his villainous Ned Pepper as foil to John Wayne in True Grit. (Also worth mentioning, his preacher character in The Apostle--a 1997 unappreciated movie in which he starred and directed.)
Here--in Tender Mercies--he plays a low-key country musician, who has been marginalized by his drunken habits, a bitter divorce, and an estranged daughter whom he hasn't seen in years. The movie has him trying to make a comeback as a singer, having taken umbrage at a war-widow's road gas station/motel, somewhere in the hinterlands of Texas. His ex-wife, Dixie, has made her way singing his songs (having stolen the rights), but Rosa Lee tries to convert his bitter spirit, and he now writes religious songs--some of which we hear in the soundtrack. When his daughter shows up, he tries to connect with her, but half-heartedly, and Mac Sledge can't even bring himself to call her by her first name. When she is killed in a car accident--she was going away with another drunkard, a man twelve years her senior--Mac toys with atheism, or at least a deep-rooted cynicism about the meaning of it all, for nothing seems to be going right in his life.
If this seems like another country-bred soap opera, take notice. Duval makes it all look natural--for he walks, moves, behaves like a defiant beaten man. He keeps his dignity, refusing $500 (at war time a lot) from a prospective publisher of his new songs, does not crawl to anyone, but his bitterness keeps people from getting closer to him. Still his swagger, accented by his natural bow-legged step, lets us know that he is not defeated, that he can rise. It is not faith that keeps him alive--as his female companion would have him--but a certain stiff-necked resistance that keeps his backbone straight against the winds and whims of fate. In a larger scale, this would be tragic stuff--but very few in today's audiences would like total catastrophe. I wouldn't. And as one watches him throw a football to his adopted son (adopted in spirit, not legally), we can see that he has the capacity to be revived, if not rejuvenated. Robert Duval could play a good Sisyphus, should Camus had still been around. He would not quite make an Oedipus or a Hamlet, for those were eloquently overblown characters who cannot be reborn, in literature (including film) or in life. Compared to those prodigies, he is small potatoes. But he makes a good drunk who can take a blow below the belt and still stand on his feet. He is a bit defiant--wretched but not a wreck. May be he will last another decade or two, could even marry Rosa Lee and legally adopt Sonny. Sue Anne cannot be brought back to life--that is what the flaw of being part of humanity entails. But Mac Sledge could wield his last name against fate--that wind of fortune that blew him at a down-trodden establishment, in the middle of nowhere, telling him perhaps that using his pick-axe to dig his garden might be a better choice than plucking his guitar strings.

November 27, 2007

Tender Mercies

So often the Academy Awards get it wrong. When the Academy gave Duvall Best Actor for portraying former country singer Max Sledge and Horton Foote Best Screenplay, they got it right. Though, Bruce Beresford should have gotten Best Director as well.

This is a quiet, gentle film. But it's powerful emotions build and linger. It is a story of redemption, marveling at grace and yet also puzzling over grace withheld.

Hollywood rarely turns the cameras on the red states and even more rarely on Evangelical Christians and even more rarely does so with compassion and understanding. (One of the few other films that does these things well also stars Robert Duvall, "The Apostle", which Duvall also wrote and directed.)

Tess Harper is also very good in the film as the woman who takes in a lost, lonely man. Look for Ellen Barkin, so young that it takes time to recognize her as Sledge's daughter.

Wonderful film. November 12, 2007

Wonderful Duval

This is the type of movie you don't see everyday but when you do, consider it a blessing. Just wonderful work by Robert and everybody else for that matter. I saw it on cable and decided I will have to own the DVD. Just wonderful. October 25, 2007

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