Tender Mercies

Yesterday happened to be the 90th birthday of Robert Duvall. I didn't realize that when I sat down the other day to watch Tender Mercies; otherwise, I would have scheduled my posts to have that show up yesterday.

Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, who wakes up one morning in a motel room that has litter strewn all over it, in a scene which made me think of Fat City. But there are some pretty big differences. Mac is drunk and in the middle of nowhere in Texas (I don't know that the movie specifically mentions where the motel is supposed to be, but the closing credits say it was filmed in Waxahachie and Palmer, which are on the southeast edges of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex), with his life at a crossroads. He asks the proprietress of the motel, Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) if he can do work as a handyman to pay off the expenses he incurred and earn his keep.

Rosa Lee is a widow with a kid she gave birth to very young, Sonny (Allan Hubbard); she having lost her husband in Vietnam such that the kid never knew his biological father. She being in need of a man accepts the offer and the two begin a sort of uneasy alliance borne of mutual need.

Mac doesn't reveal too much about his past at first, only doing so when a van comes up to the attached gas station that probably earns most of the money at the place. Five guys come out, led by Robert (Lenny von Dohlen). They're the Slater Mill Boys, a country-and-western band that have dreams but are really more in it for the love of music and performing because they all have to have day jobs to pay the bills. However, they recognize Mac, who was a country singer/songwriter himself before winding up here thanks to the bottle.

Mac didn't just have a career in the country music industry; he also had a wife Dixie (Betty Buckley) in the industry. But even though she made it in part by singing the songs Mac wrote, she filed for divorce because alcohol made Mac violent and Dixie didn't want their daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin) ton end up in the same sort of relationship. Mac hasn't seen his daughter in years, and when he tries to see her, Dixie gets extremely angry. Mac has also written another song at the motel, and asks Dixie's manager Harry (Wilford Brimley) if he might offer it to Dixie.

Back at the motel, Sonny is beginning to look up to Mac as the father he's never had before, and Mac is thinking of giving up the music industry to stay here. There's a scene early in the movie when he goes to church with Rosa Lee and Sonny and the preacher asks him if he's been baptized, which is a fairly obvious bit of foreshadowing (now, if Mac had been Catholic....). But it also shows how Rosa Lee is beginning to have an effect on Mac.

There are more twists and turns, however, as Dixie refuses Mac's song so he offers it to Robert's band, which wants Mac to sing it; also, Sue Ann runs away from Dixie to see Mac, informing him that she's in a relationship with one of Dixie's backup musicians, which is a huge red flag. It results in, well, more things happening.

Tender Mercies is the sort of movie where things happen and then the movie sort of just ends, because it's not supposed to be any sort of great meaning, but just a slice of life of all of these people. The characters are well-drawn and mostly sympathetic even when they're doing things that might seem mean. Dixie, for example, has been less than honest with Sue Ann about Mac, but considering the way Mac treated Dixie, it's understandable, along with why she'd reject Mac's song and Harry would say it's bad at first.

Robert Duvall gives a fine performance and wins the Oscar for it, but really, everybody else in the movie does a fine job too. I really enjoyed the production design, which captures the very modest conditions most of the characters are living in. Everything comes together to make a very high-quality little movie that I can highly recommend.