lasttimeisaw An endearing portrait of a weather-beaten American country musician Mac Sledge (Duvall), who takes the pledge and plumps for an ordinary life with his new wife Rose Lee (Harper) in the sticks. Australian director Bruce Beresford's first Hollywood outing emphatically breaks his duck by inducing an Oscar-crowning tour-de-force from a wonderfully amiable Robert Duvall, and what is more at a premium is the film's unpretentious tonality and lyrical felicity which stirs up an aptly authentic reverberations among its viewers, out of the story's sensible universality and abstention from small-town provincialism. Fetching up in a motel in a middle-of-nowhere Texas, the lush Mac is broke and has to pay off his staying by working for the motel owner, that happens to be Rose Lee, a young widow who has lost her husband in the Vietnam war and now runs the motel with her school-age son Sonny (Hubbard, this is his sole screen credit but he is down right sympathetic). A down-to-earth union takes its shape in due course and that is the blissful family life a man and a woman (and a fatherless child) could ever dream of. Meantime, Mac's backstory trickles alongside his new-found happiness, his ex-wife Dixie Scott (Buckley, shrilly shines in her Dolly Parton-inflected singing bent and edgy streak) is still a highly demanded touring singer feeding off on songs Mac wrote for her, and Mac has been proscribed from seeing their daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin's second film credit), now in a troubled age of 18, ever since the inimical divorce (whose raison d'être entails alcoholism and domestic violence). So naturally, there are some fences needed mending, and through tacit love, old/new friendship and religion (not pedagogic but with a waft of sincere communion), Mac will eventually get hold of the most precious values about love, loss, family and life itself (past and present), they are mundanely traditional, but gleaming with a patina of poetic finesse under Beresford's sober and unobtrusive execution (you might anticipate an old soak's inevitable interlude of backsliding, which would serve as a jolting plot swerve, but nonetheless, that doesn't need to happen every time in a movie's plot!), which elevates this gem from other blasé offerings replete with lachrymosity and/or melancholia.The film is based on American playwright Horton Foote's tender-hearted and unaffected script (also reaped an Oscar), his very first original screenplay if truth be told, and there is no dispute on Mr. Duvall's quietly touching impersonation of a country singer in his own raw voice, like Mac's persona, his musical rendition is also mostly touching when he is simply strumming and humming inside his homestead, music should always have its self-pleasing precept before becoming a crowd-pleasing commodity. However, it is utterly remiss that Tess Harper is hardly hailed for her equally brilliant turn (a Golden Globe nomination is the solitary consolation, but she is leading in my book), an immaculate screen debut, her Rose Lee exemplifies a woman who truly understands how to tame a jaded soul and wills herself to stand behind her imperfect husband and support him through the vagaries, it is such a rare performance completely devoid of pretension and self- awarenss, her tranquil gaze magnificently rounds off this essential small-tale-with-a-big-heart boon, a slam-dunk melodrama.

gavin6942 A broken-down, middle-aged country singer (Robert Duvall) gets a new wife, reaches out to his long-lost daughter, and tries to put his troubled life back together.The film encompasses several different themes, including the importance of love and family, the possibility of spiritual resurrection amid death, and the concept of redemption through Mac Sledge's conversion to Christianity. Following poor test screening results, distributor Universal Pictures made little effort to publicize Tender Mercies, which Duvall attributed to the studio's lack of understanding of country music.Although I have little interest in country music, no interesting religious conversation, and almost no interest in love and family, this film still spoke to me. Duvall is just perfect, and I had no idea he could sing. For his performance along, it deserves more recognition.

MartinHafer "Tender Mercies" is one of those rare movies I have seen more than once. The first time was back in the early 1980s when it first came out and I must admit it that I didn't particularly like it. I felt it was just way too slow and too low energy. So, almost three decades later, I decided to give it a try once again. After all, I've seen a lot of films since then and my tastes have changed considerably. And, since this is a film that earned Robert Duvall the Oscar for Best Actor, I decided to give it a try once again.So what did I think this time? Well, I certainly liked it a lot more. But, I can STILL understand why it didn't appeal to me when I was 19 and saw it the first time. If you are looking for excitement or much in the way of pacing, then the film would clearly be tough going. But, as I've aged, I much more look for characterizations--and there are many good ones in this one--particularly Robert Duvall. He did a nice job in portraying an alcoholic musician--a guy who must have been the inspiration, at least in part, for Jeff Bridges' starring role in "Crazy Heart"--a film which, incidentally, featured Duvall in a supporting role! Overall a fascinating but slow film--good for someone willing to cut the film a bit of slack.

runamokprods A gentle quiet film, wonderfully written by Horton Foote, and featuring a magnificent performance by Robert Duvall as an alcoholic ex-country singer star, who rediscovers himself by finding a family. Ordinarily this kind of upbeat view could be treacly, or seem like a Hollywood simplification. But here it's simultaneously rich and sparse, and even in a world where life is ultimately good, there are still tragedies big and small, broken hearts and terrible losses. This is that rare 'feel good' film that earns the right. The supporting work by Tess Harper and Betty Buckley is worth mentioning as well, as is Bruce Beresford's understated but always effective and evocative direction.But ultimately it's Foote's screenplay, set in a world where predictability and cliché are the usual, that manages to pull off the almost impossible and create something unique, tender, and new.