And we're back with another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com, once again revisiting an 80s film that got the big nod (With this one under my belt I've now watched half the 1980s nominees).
Today it's the 1983 drama Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Robert Duvall as a Mac Sledge, a former country & western singer, now a penniless drifter. Mac stays with a friend at a roadside motel one night, they get drunk, and the friend beats him up and ditches him there. The next morning instead of running out on his bill, he goes to the owner, a lonely widow named Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and offers to work it off. That leads to him becoming her employee, and later the two get married. Mac develops a fatherly relationship with Rosa's son, filling a void left by the daughter he's no longer allowed to see. One day a traveling young country band stops by for gas, having read a story about Mac in the local paper. The band are big fans of his work, and over the course of a few weeks, coax him back into the music business. At the same time Mac's daughter Sue Anne pays him a visit and the two begin to reconnect.
I found it difficult to find a lot to say about Tender Mercies, as it's so understated and cut up into short little life episodes it doesn't play out like a conventional drama. The first act consists of very brief scenes of minimalist dialogue that often end mid-conversation, like a scene at the dinner table where Rosa Lee's son asks Mac his name and he responds, and then the scene is over. Or when Mac and Rosa Lee are having a living room conversation and the kid yells from the other room "Can you stop talking, I'm trying to sleep!" They share a little laugh and that's it. The scene where Mac asks her to marry him is so matter-of-fact and abrupt I wondered if there were scenes and moments excised from the film prior to release.
The performances are equally understated, conveyed largely through body language. Duvall won an Oscar and his performance reminded me of Heath Ledger's in Brokeback Mountain; both characters carry a backbreaking weight of shame and seem overwhelmed by the energy it takes to speak. The one line of Mac's that stuck with me was "I don't trust happiness. Never have, never will." I get it; when you've failed at something too many times success feels fleeting and conditional. You're always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I'd give Tender Mercies a mild recommendation; it's not the most exciting or memorable or even dramatic film, but Duvall's performance is a compelling exercise in restraint and the motel on a lonesome Texas road carries a bit of Werner Herzog's "voodoo of location" vibe. At 92 minutes the movie certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, in fact it could've used another 10-15 minutes to flesh out some things and let them breathe.
I give the film *** out of ****.
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