[originally published in The Weekly, May 4, 1983]
The man has been around for some time; several days, a week — we can’t be sure. The guy he was traveling with moved on, leaving him among the cigarette butts and half-empty bottles in the clapboard country-roadside motel. Upon coming to and finding himself penniless to pay for the room, he offered to odd-job his way out of debt to the lady who operates the place. She accepted — “No drinking on the job,” though — and he stayed on. Now, one night at supper, her young son eyes him across the table and asks, “Mister, what’s yore name?”
That’s the way life gets sorted out in Tender Mercies. Nothing forced, no privileged information elicited or shoved into the foreground before its time. The characters and their collective life will not be butted and chivvied into artificial poses so that conventional rhythms of “story” can be satisfied. This drifter and the roadside lady come to care for each other (months have gone by now, we know from in-passing references in the dialogue), but we do not see them marry. We do not even see them agree to marry: He asks her whether she’s ever thought about marrying again, says he’s been thinking about it, asks if she’ll think about marrying him. She agrees to think about it. Next scene we see, schoolkids are taunting her boy, Sonny, about his mother’s new husband.
The slippage of scenes — the omission of conventional Big Scenes between scenes, as it were — does not imply that anything common-law has been allowed to develop (the lady is a good Baptist, after all; they’ve been married, legal and proper). What this narrative technique does imply is that life’s truest ceremonies are celebrated in the random minutiae of everyday experience. And that is right nextdoor to recognizing the film’s theme of “tender mercies”: that the pain of mortality, of being bound on a deathward journey whose purpose and itinerary often seem obscure, can be truly alleviated not by spectacular sunsets, exceptional interventions in the progress of existence, but rather by quiet moments of self-knowledge, of seeing oneself in perspective with one’s fellows and one’s environment, in the limpid light of day.
It’s easy, and all but irrelevant, to synopsize the film on an anecdotal level. The drifter, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), used to be a major force as a country-western singer-songwriter; he drank too much, his wife’s singing career began to eclipse his own, he lost both his family and his professional standing.
The movie begins at a point about a decade later, and traces his recovery of peace of mind as far from the public eye as the rural Texas gas station–motel where he fetches up. He wins the love of Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), the Baptist lady whose high-school-sweetheart husband died in Vietnam, and her son (Allan Hubbard), though contrary to the terms of most “ordinary people” movies there are only a couple of discreet kisses between Mac and Rosa Lee, and no teary hugs of mutual manliness between stepfather and stepson. Some young local musicians remember Mac’s bygone stardom and cherish him as an “inspiration”; privately, he’s continued to write songs, and it begins to look as if he might be able to sell a few to ease the economic pressure on the small family business. He even hazards a public performance with the young men’s band, though he fears his voice is gone; no Rocky-style triumph ensues, no stellar return to the glitz and limelight — just a few dozen folks in a tavern having a good time on a Saturday night. He crosses horns with his ex-wife (Betty Buckley), reencounters the daughter (Ellen Barkin) who’s now at the age he was when his career got underway. Life-changing things happen, but life, as limned in Tender Mercies, doesn’t really change.
There are precedents for this kind of film, though they’re not to be found in either of the recent American genres to which the movie might seem related — the ordinary-people genre or the country-music film. Fact is (and I can’t imagine higher praise, or a sharper index of the film’s distinctiveness), the cinematic shade most consistently evoked by Tender Mercies is that of Yasujiro Ozu. The patient, undemonstrative camera, the overall avoidance of “drama” in deference to the rhythms of everyday growth and experience; the willingness to insert sensitive yet un-“beautiful” still lifes of places, signs, and clear skies into the narrative flow; the gentle human comedy that issues, not from characters “being funny,” but rather from their and our accumulating familiarity with eccentricities of speech and behavior that prove indispensable to people’s knowledge of and caring about one another — these are eminently, almost exclusively, characteristic of the late Japanese master’s work.
Certainly they are not qualities I ever expected to encounter in a film by the Australian director Bruce Beresford. Indeed, heretofore Beresford has struck me as one of the most inveterately vulgar (if often lively and amusing) filmmakers at work in the contemporary cinema. Beresford may have been consciously emulating Ozu; or, in his American debut, he may have been responding to the tender artistry of Horton Foote’s screenplay, to the qualities of actors like Robert Duvall and Tess Harper, and to the persuasive veracity of the Texas locations and more or less found sets. Whatever the reason, and whether or not Beresford ever succeeds in making another film as fine and valid as Tender Mercies, he has achieved here a discipline and an utterly unsentimentalized sweetness that amount to an order of grace.
Beresford’s previous movies, including the vastly overrated ‘Breaker’ Morant, are rife with arbitrary, attention-grabbing camera tactics and an insulting penchant for good-guy–bad-guy sectoring of cast and dramatic issues. Without exception, the camera movements and placements in Tender Mercies enrich our understanding of the film’s world and the people who inhabit it. Like Ozu, Beresford avoids closeups, mostly favoring a slightly low-angle perspective at sufficient remove that we are always aware of the characters within their setting, and a framespace deep enough (though this is not especially Ozu-like) that, say, Rosa Lee at work in the background of a kitchen scene is made privy to and part of the interaction between Mac and Sonny in the middle-foreground. Camera movements are not invisibly functional, but they don’t seek to dazzle. They serve instead as visual invitations to the audience to share in the film’s quiet splendors: the odd, ultimately auspicious drift round Sonny at play near the front porch while, offscreen, Mac is heard asking Rosa Lee whether he can stay on and work off his debt; the funny, lyric joy of the track along the town boardwalk as Mac is escorted and courted by the hairy, mostly oversize galoots in the country-Western band; the horizon-sweeping curve round Mac near the end of the film, bent over his gardening and confessing his despair of ever understanding why things turn out as they do — “I don’t trust happiness….”
I don’t know whether Beresford got to do any rewriting on Tender Mercies (he did on most of his Australian films); it seems unlikely when we consider that the project existed in the form of Horton Foote’s script long before Beresford was cast as director, and that Foote and Robert Duvall are not only collaborators of long standing (To Kill a Mockingbird, Tomorrow) but also co-producers. By all means, keep Beresford away from the writing department in future, for Tender Mercies is blessedly free of his previous order of straw-man dramatic strategy (cf. most particularly The Getting of Wisdom and The Club). Even Mac’s ex-wife, Dixie, an almost entirely unsympathetic character as both vindictive former spouse and self-involved performer onstage, is seen, as Jean Renoir put it, to have her reasons. Beresford surely deserves some of the credit for the almost comic (and therefore humanizing) desperation the actress Betty Buckley brings to the part. And if no one imaginably needs to tell that sterling character actor Wilford Brimley how to make warmth and caginess cohabit in the character of Harry, her manager, still I’d lay odds it was the director who put the finishing touch on one of Brimley’s scenes. Harry’s just stepped out onto the sidewalk to talk with Mac. A theater cop steps overhastily out of the lobby and then lounges against the wall with unconvincing casualness. One infers that, pleased and heartened as Harry might be to hear his old friend Mac was back on his feet and waiting outside to see him, he just wasn’t sure whether a little muscle mightn’t be needed to keep him in line.
It is by now no secret that in Tender Mercies Robert Duvall gives one of the best, most fully realized performances ever seen in an American film. Many people have remarked how thoroughly Duvall manages to disappear into the characters he plays, so that he has seemed always destined to remain a character actor rather than shining like a star. (Duvall probably counts this as one of his life’s tender mercies.) Mac Sledge may change that, as even the flamboyant Colonel Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) and Bull Meechum (The Great Santini) didn’t quite manage to do.
Duvall becomes Mac rightly enough — never has the skin drawn so tautly across the skull, the hair lain so lank and whispery-thin from weather and dust and dreams populous with demons he can greet by their first names. He can take a line like “I could eat” — in answer to Rosa Lee’s “Are you hungry?” after Mac’s dragged himself out of a two-day hangover and proposed the terms of his staying on — and make it define where his character stands just then, the precise nature of his needs and desires, what he would never ask for but will accept, the conditions of that acceptance being understood and acknowledged by both parties to the transaction. His craft is breathtaking. There’s a scene in which Mac sets out to teach Sonny something about music, introduce one of his songs to Rosa Lee, and perform the song while running a wry counterpoint to the lyrics in his commentary. Duvall’s recurring “D-as-in-Dawg” at once comically demystifies the moment and anneals the mastery of the actor to the born-again self-possession of the character. That’s stardom winking at us without breaking faith or stride.
She isn’t in that league yet, but any appreciation of Tender Mercies that didn’t also pay tribute to Tess Harper would be willfully obtuse. Common decency may be the hardest quality to capture winningly and well (again Ozu is the truest touchstone), but Harper, a Texas actress in her first movie role, makes Rosa Lee one of the most valuable people we’ve ever met on film. Her face is as four-square as her spiritual integrity, and she gives it to the camera as naturally and unassumingly as the phrase “tender mercies,” which is hers to deliver and make eloquent and nurturing as spring rain. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone find more nuances in a smile. Singing in the church choir (for she too has her music), she watches first Sonny and then Mac baptized into her faith. The joy she feels embarrasses her a bit; surely she ought to be more solemn. But the smile just has to come, spreading wide as glory. Watching her watching, we feel it on our faces too.
Copyright © 1983 by Richard T. Jameson