Bruce Beresford’s 1983 Oscar-winning drama, Tender Mercies, tells the story of fictional country-western singer, Mac Sledge, played by Robert Duvall in what has so far proved to be the only academy-award winning performance among his six nominations over a forty-year career. Mac battles troubles in and out of the music business, having trouble with his record companies and manager, as well as his continuously escalating alcoholism and the persistent troubles of his broken family. We begin our film with Mac waking up after a night of heavy drinking, passed out in a small motel room in the middle of nowhere, abandoned by his manager and with his life passing him by. It is here that we are first introduced to Beresford’s silent transitions and consistently stoic camera and direction choices. They instantly succeed in setting the mundane, mid-western mood for the entire piece. Rather than jump back on the troubled path to fame, Mac decides to stay at the small motel and gas station, run by a young attractive widow, Rosa Lee, and her young son, Sonny. He starts off serving simply as a helping hand around the station, contemplating to himself, eating silent dinners with the family at night, and finding his place in the world.
Duvall’s performance here is first-class throughout. It really attests to his talent that he’s able to express such power and emotion in a PG rated film, completely devoid of any curse-laden outbursts or scenes of violence. It’s amazing to watch him instill such complexity in a simple, soft-spoken character. We watch Mac intently, knowing little about his past, but sensing his many years of pain and frustration, partly due to his ex-wife, Dixie, a country singing star, and his 18 year old daughter, Sue Anne, whom Dixie has forbidden him from seeing. Duvall’s Oscar was definitely well-deserved, and it’s nice to see he was able to equal up to the early 80’s work of his co-stars in The Godfather films, made nearly a decade earlier. His performance here ranks right up there with James Caan’s work in Thief, as well as Al Pacino’s performance in Scarface, all strong portrayals of morally-conflicted men in character-driven dramas. Duvall’s turn as Mac Sledge was also tremendously more effective than his other Oscar-nominated performance of the decade, that of Lieutenant Colonel Bull Meechum in 1980’s The Great Santini.
As time passes, Mac and Rosa Lee’s relationship morphs from simple employer-employee friendship, to mutual attraction, and eventually marriage. In the film, this all seems to happen rather quickly, with little indication of the amount of the time passing at all. These sometimes jarring and unexpected chronology changes actually work well in the end, helping to express the timelessness of the characters and setting. Throughout it all, director Beresford resists the temptation to go into clichéd relapses for Mac and simply show several temptations and near-misses. The fact that Mac never really falls back into his old afflictions indicate his perseverance and determination, and his love for his new family. We see none of the glitz and glamour of Mac’s former life, just the dusty familiarity of his new, small-town existence out of the spotlight. In this manner, this film serves as a nice companion piece to Robert Altman’s Nashville, here showcasing the lesser side of the county-music industry, it’s characters, and it’s setting. It’s interesting also to note that despite the fact that our main character is a musician, we wait the majority of the film to hear him play any music, a technique reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Last Days.
There’s a number of stand-out scenes here for both Duvall and Beresford. Shortly after Mac’s daughter comes back into his life, we watch him one afternoon, staring out the window thinking to himself, and he breaks into a somber song. Beresford chooses to shoot the whole scene in one take, looking at Duvall from behind, telling so much about his thoughts of his former life and his feelings for his daughter. Later on, we see Mac finally get baptized, on the same day his step-son Sonny experiences the same rite of passage. The set-up of this scene strikes up parallels between the young and naïve Sonny, a boy with new beginnings in life, and the old, relatively naïve Mac, the middle aged man with similarly renewed opportunities. Later, after tragedy hits Mac and his family when his daughter is killed in a car accident, Mac goes to visit his ex-wife Dixie, and in one of her only scenes in the film, she cries and unknowingly showcases her ultimate selfishness to Mac. She sees her daughter’s death only as God punishing her, and barely thinks of her daughter or the pain Mac is going through. This is followed by a powerful Duvall monologue in a garden, where he reveals his reluctance to embrace normalcy and peace with Rosa Lee, his reluctance to embrace happiness. Again, Beresford has the directing savvy to know the scene holds the most dramatic weight when filmed in a single take, and here he adds in a graceful, semi-circular pan around Mac as he chokes out his words to Rosa Lee between tears.
As the film draws to a close, the side-plot line of the young Sonny finding out things about his own life comes to a climax as he confronts his mother in their house and asks her about the father he never knew. Immediately after, he goes and plays football with Mac in the fields during sunset in the film’s final moments. The juxtaposition of these two scenes provides for closure on both Mac and Sonny’s storylines, as Sonny has finally expressed his full embracement of Mac as his real father figure, and Mac has, at least to some extent, finally found happiness, security, and mental peace in his life. Through all of his trials and tribulations, and the many ups and downs of his years, he has ultimately found bliss in the simple, and tender mercies.
