56th Academy Awards (1984)
Nominations: 5
Wins: 2
We end our shortened week of Oscar reviews with the type of film that usually pops up here or there at the Oscars each year. I’m talking about the small film that serves as an actor’s showcase, and thus gets its star nominated for an acting Oscar, but rarely also gets nominated for Best Picture. Well, that wasn’t the case with Tender Mercies, which nabbed a Best Picture nom as well as a second Best Screenplay Oscar for Horton Foote. But when you get down to it, this is a film built around an Oscar-winning performance by Robert Duvall, an actor who was never entirely built to be a leading man, but in a low budget, unshowy film like this, gets to show all that he’s capable of. This was very satisfying to see in the wake of his recent passing, especially when I’m sure we’ll get to see this prolific actor mentioned in the “In Memoriam” section of the Oscars tonight.
Tender Mercies starts off by giving you very little information about our main character, Mac Sledge (played by Robert Duvall), who we first encounter drunk in a hotel room in a tiny hotel and gas station in the middle of nowhere Texas. After meeting the owner, Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a widow living there with her son, he offers to do some work around the hotel to earn his stay. She obliges, and after a very brief courting, he professes his desire to marry her, which she agrees to. We also see him becoming more open-minded to her religious tendencies, despite not being the churchgoing type. However, we then learn that this mysterious man is the country singer Mac Sledge when a reporter stops by their house one day, asking why Mac has decided to hide in anonymity, while mentioning that his ex-wife, the more successful country singer Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), is performing nearby.
After the reporter publishes a story about Mac, word starts to get around town that he’s been holed up in this hotel, and a local bar band stops by one day to pay their respects to one of their heroes. Mac goes to Dixie’s show one night and has a somewhat tumultuous reunion with her backstage, giving us a sense of the difficult man he was before he tried to start life anew. During this meeting, Dixie mentions Mac’s daughter, who has only been briefly mentioned so far, while Sledge also mentions that he’s been working on some new songs, which we’ve seen him playing at the hotel.
The rest of the film more or less revolves around Sledge wrestling with these two things: his severed relationship with his now adult daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), and trying to get up the courage to start playing music again. On the music front, the dudes in the bar band get back in touch with Mac and convince him to record one of his new songs on a smaller record label and eventually start singing live again. This step back into his old life suits Sledge well, as he seems to still have it when the band plays with him at a local honky-tonk, and at least for a time, him and Sue Anne seem to be in a good place. However, tragedy eventually strikes, and Sledge starts to feel restless, summing up his reservations about the married, settled-down life in the great line: “I don’t trust happiness. Never did, never will.”
Tender Mercies seems to be the product of three hard-headed men coming at this material from very different perspectives. First off, you have Horton Foote, who had won an Oscar 20 years earlier for adapting his stage play of To Kill A Mockingbird, though he was so sure he wouldn’t win that he ended up skipping the ceremony entirely. At this point, Foote was a very accomplished playwright, but had gone back and forth over the years about his desire to write more screenplays. However, after adapting his play Tomorrow into the 1972 film of the same name, starring Mr. Robert Duvall, he became more interested in writing a story specifically for the screen. This ended up being Tender Mercies, which he based both on his nephew’s struggles in the country music business, as well as seeing many people struggle with alcoholism while working in the theater.
Another man coming at this material with a very specific point of view was director Bruce Beresford, an Aussie who was directing his first American film. Despite having some feelings of imposter syndrome due to his inexperience with the American South, he was able to relate these small-town folks to the people he knew living on the fringes of the Australian outback. Meanwhile, Robert Duvall had always had an interest in country music, almost being cast in Robert Altman’s Nashville, but turned it down because Altman was uninterested in using Duvall’s own songs. Due to the personal interest Duvall had in this story, he clashed regularly with Beresford, who had a very meticulous way of working, storyboarding every single shot, and thus alienating the more freewheeling Duvall.
However, it seems like this was the kind of onset antagonism that these three men saw as beneficial to the film. My favorite story about the production of Tender Mercies involves Duvall spending extended time living in West Texas before shooting started, observing the different accents that people had there and having them talk into a tape recorder, in the hopes of hitting on the perfect voice to give Mac Sledge. He eventually found a man who had the perfect accent that he wanted, so Duvall had him recite the entire script into a tape recorder. Which is just absolutely insane, but I love it.
You have to ask, does this attention to detail add up to a great performance, deserving of an Academy Award? I think so. Robert Duvall is an actor who was always very much himself onscreen, never transforming too much into a role, but also containing a wide range, able to go very big or be very subtle, sometimes within the same role. Tender Mercies is more on the subtle side, as this is a much more insular performance. I would say it’s more in line with something like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, but also containing flare-ups where we see the angrier side of Mac that have led to a certain kind of loneliness that the film embodies.
Because a lot of Duvall’s performance is fairly introverted, you also have to give credit to Beresford’s direction, which emphasizes the barrenness and big open spaces of Texas and how they relate to Mac’s uneasy relationship with happiness, as well as the women in his life. It’s also always nice to see a film that manages to capture the South without being condescending, and despite Foote being the only authentic Southerner involved in the production, the film captures the quiet resilience of these small-town folk while also showing the quirks that make their corner of the country unique.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s a little strange that Tender Mercies snuck into the Best Picture race that year, since it’s not the type of film that would make that consistent of a showing at the Oscars throughout the rest of the ’80s. It typifies a certain kind of American ’80s movie I really love, where you get to see people living on the fringes of Reagan’s America, which stands in stark contrast to the more polished, consumerist films that were reflective of the decade. They’re the type of films that are more akin to the character-driven spirit of the ’70s, and in which one of that decade’s more reliable actors like Duvall could truly thrive.