Movie Review: “Tender Mercies”
By Anne Bernays
Those of you who have read what I write for ArtSpeak, know that I’m a less-is-more kind of girl. Infected by Ernest Hemingway, my own prose tends to be boiled down to its basics. Henry James—with the exception of some of his short stories, drives me nuts, as do Cormac Macarthy and Annie Proulx. The movie “Tender Mercies” is spare, lean, and has the same sort of impact that a Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach Invention do—an emotional impact within a small canvas.
When a movie like “Tender Mercies” comes along, I fall hard. This 1987 movie, with Robert Duvall, and the less known but equally convincing Tess Harper, delivers a compact, straightforward story of the rebirth of a boozy singer/songwriter named Mac Sledge, who meets a Vietnam war widow with a young child running a gas station/motel somewhere in the Texas badlands. The landscape couldn’t be bleaker, but the slowly growing love of these two characters for each other is so believable that you accept it from the moment they start talking to each other . Needless to say, neither one of them is exactly garrulous; they say what they have to say and then shut up.
Not a single punch is thrown in this movie, not a single car chase or acrobatic stunt. The violence that does appear is off-camera: a fatal car accident and the recent war in Vietnam that killed the widow’s young husband. Bruce Beresford, the director and Horton Foote, the screenwriter, count on our imaginations to do the work generally accomplished by onscreen mayhem. Their restraint is masterful.
Robert Duvall is so adept at singing and playing the guitar that it’s hard to believe the movie’s background material which claims that he learned these skills in order to play Sledge, a name suggesting a kind of hammer used to break rocks (jail) and drive fence posts (planting and growing), the two possible roads for this guy to take. When he chooses the latter we’re relieved. Though unschooled, Sledge is an artist.
What seems odd is that it takes religion seriously, showing how it can heal and bind emotional wounds. For me, a non-believer, to accept this is astonishing.
If you’re looking for a Happy Ending, go elsewhere. in If you’re looking for the Truth about how most of us are more than willing to muddle on in spite of wars, violence, and betrayal watch “Tender Mercies.” It’s all there, thanks to its honesty and its art.
