Tender Mercies Reviews

This low-key drama set in Texas is one of the continuing stories of screenwriter Horton Foote's life in the hinterlands. Robert Duvall, who won an Oscar for his performance, is Mac Sledge, a down-and-out singer who has recently broken up with his wife, Dixie (Betty Buckley), also a country singer. Mac gets rip-roaring drunk and wakes up in a motel-gas-station owned by a religious widow, Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), with a young son (Allan Hubbard). Rosa offers Mac a job, so he stays on, and the two fall in love. Meanwhile, Dixie and her manager (Wilford Brimley) are lurking in the background, and Mac attempts to patch matters up with her and their daughter (Ellen Barkin). He also tries to make a comeback. TENDER MERCIES is an episodic gem that offers little in the way of action or melodrama but gets by on fine performances (particularly from Barkin and from Duvall, who does his own singing), atmospheric cinematography, and spare, unglamorous writing. Australian director Bruce Beresford's first American assignment, the film bears interesting comparison with Englishman Michael Apted's COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER (another outsider's vision of the world of country), and with Foote's later, probably superior, THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL.