Tender Mercies is a 1983 American drama film directed by Bruce Beresford and written by Horton Foote. It stars Robert Duvall as singer-songwriter Mac Sledge, a former country music star whose career and relationship with his ex-wife and daughter were wrecked by alcoholism. Recovering from his affliction, Sledge seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young widow and her son in rural Texas. The supporting cast includes Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin, and Allan Hubbard.

Financed by EMI Films, Tender Mercies was shot largely in Waxahachie, Texas. The script was rejected by several American directors before the Australian Beresford accepted it. Duvall, who sang his own songs in the film, drove more than 600 miles (1,000 km) throughout the state, tape recording local accents and playing in country music bands to prepare for the role. He and Beresford repeatedly clashed during production, at one point prompting the director to walk off the set and reportedly consider quitting the film.

The film encompasses several 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 publicise Tender Mercies, which Duvall attributed to the studio's lack of understanding of country music.

The film was released on March 4, 1983, in a limited number of theatres. Although unsuccessful at the box office, it was critically acclaimed and earned five Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. At the 56th Academy Awards. Tender Mercies won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for Foote and Duvall won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Plot

Washed-up, alcoholic country singer-songwriter Mac Sledge awakens at a run-down Texas roadside motel and gas station after a night of heavy drinking. He meets the owner, a young widow named Rosa Lee, and offers to perform maintenance work there in exchange for a room. Rosa, whose husband died in the Vietnam War, is raising her young son, Sonny, on her own. She agrees to let Mac stay on condition that he does not drink while working. During quiet evenings, they sit alone and share parts of their life stories.

Mac resolves to give up alcohol and start his life anew. After enough days of keeping his word and doing his work, he is comfortable enough in his new life that he and Rosa Lee wed. They start attending a Baptist church on a regular basis. A newspaper reporter eventually visits the motel and asks Mac whether he has stopped recording music and if he has deliberately chosen to lead an anonymous life. When Mac refuses to answer, the reporter explains he is writing a story about him and has interviewed his ex-wife, Dixie Scott, a country music star who is performing nearby.

After the story is published, the neighbourhood learns of Mac's past, and members of a local country–western band visit him to show their respect. Despite greeting them politely, Mac remains reluctant to open up about his past. Later, he secretly attends Dixie's concert. She passionately sings songs that Mac wrote years earlier, and he leaves in the middle of the performance. Backstage, he talks to Dixie's manager, his old friend, Harry. Mac gives him a copy of a new song he has written and asks him to show it to Dixie. Mac tries to talk to Dixie, who becomes angry on seeing him and warns him to stay away from their 18-year-old daughter, Sue Anne.

Upon returning home, Mac assures Rosa Lee that he no longer has any feelings for Dixie, telling her that Dixie is "poison." Later, Harry visits Mac to tell him, seemingly at Dixie's urging, that the country music business has changed and his new song is no good. Hurt and angry, Mac drives away and nearly crashes the truck. He buys a bottle of whiskey, but returning home to a worried Rosa Lee and Sonny, he tells them he poured it out. He says he tried to leave Rosa Lee, but found he could not. Mac and Sonny are later baptised together in Rosa Lee's church.

Eventually, Sue Anne visits Mac—their first encounter since she was a child. Mac asks whether she got any of his letters, and she says her mother kept them from her. She also reports that Dixie tried to keep her from visiting Mac, and that, despite her mother's objections, she is eloping with her boyfriend. Mac admits that he used to hit Dixie and that she divorced him after he tried to kill her in a drunken rage. Sue Anne asks whether Mac remembers a song about a dove he sang to her when she was a baby. He claims he does not, but after she leaves, he sings to himself the hymn "On the Wings of a Dove".

Boys at school bully Sonny about his dead father. Meanwhile, the members of the local country band ask Mac permission to perform one of his songs, and he agrees. Mac begins performing with them, and they make plans to record together. His newfound happiness is interrupted when Sue Anne dies in a car crash. Mac attends his daughter's funeral at Dixie's lavish home in Nashville and comforts her when she breaks down.

Back home, Mac keeps quiet about his emotional pain, but wonders aloud to Rosa Lee why his once sorry existence has been given meaning, and, on the other hand, his daughter has died. Throughout his mourning, Mac continues his new life with Rosa Lee and Sonny. Sonny eventually finds a football that Mac has left as a gift for him. Mac is watching the motel from a field across the road, singing the hymn to himself. Sonny thanks him for the football, and the two play catch together as Rosa Lee watches them through a window.

Cast

  • Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge
  • Tess Harper as Rosa Lee
  • Betty Buckley as Dixie
  • Wilford Brimley as Harry
  • Ellen Barkin as Sue Anne
  • Allan Hubbard as Sonny
  • Lenny Von Dohlen as Robert
  • Paul Gleason as Reporter
  • Michael Crabtree as Lewis Menefee
  • Norman Bennett as Reverend Hotchkiss

Production

Writing

Playwright Horton Foote reportedly considered giving up on film writing, due to what he regarded as a poor adaptation of his 1952 play The Chase into a 1966 film of the same name, in which Robert Duvall had a supporting role. Following what Foote saw as a far more successful adaptation of his 1968 play Tomorrow in the 1972 feature film of the same name starring Duvall (who had his movie debut as Boo Radley in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird that was scripted by Foote), his interest in filmmaking was rekindled, with the condition that he maintain some degree of control over the final product.

Foote said of this stage in his career, "I learned that film really should be like theatre in the sense that, in theatre, the writer is, of course, very dominant ... If we don't like something, we can speak our minds. ... It is always a collaborative effort. ... But in Hollywood it wasn't so. A writer there has in his contract that you are a writer for hire, which means that you write a script, then it belongs to them." This renewed interest in cinema prompted Foote to write Tender Mercies, his first work written specifically for the screen. In the view of biographer George Terry Barr, the script reflected "Foote's determination to battle a Hollywood system that generally refuses to make such personal films." Foote said, "This older man had been through it all. As I thought about a storyline, I got very interested in that type of character."

Foote based Sledge's victory over alcoholism on his observations of theatre people struggling with the problem. He sought to avoid a melodramatic slant in telling that aspect of the story. He chose the title Tender Mercies, from the Book of Psalms, for its relation to the Rosa Lee character, who he said seeks only "certain moments of gentleness or respite, [not] grandness or largeness".

Development

Duvall, who had appeared in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), which Foote adapted from the Harper Lee novel, was involved in Tender Mercies as an actor and co-producer from its earliest stages. He said the script appealed to him because of the basic values it underlined and because the themes were universal even though the story was local. Duvall felt it portrayed people from the central region of the United States without parodying them, as he said many Hollywood films tend to do. Duvall's early involvement led to rumors that he had requested Foote write the script for him, something that both men denied. The script was rejected by many American directors, creating concerns for Foote and the producers that the film would never be made. Foote later said, "This film was turned down by every American director on the face of the globe."

Beresford was attracted to the idea of making a Hollywood film with a big budget and powerful distribution. Following his success with Breaker Morant, Beresford received about 150 Hollywood scripts as potential projects; although he went weeks before reading many of them, Beresford read Tender Mercies right away. It immediately appealed to him, in part because it dealt with aspects of American rural life he had seldom encountered in film scripts. He contacted EMI Films and asked for one month to visit Texas and familiarize himself with the state before committing to direct, to which the company agreed. Beresford said of the trip, "I want to come over and see if this is all true, because if it's not really a true picture of what it's all like, it wouldn't be right to make it."

thumb|right|300px|alt=A flat, rural setting under a vast sky. On the left, a man sits on the porch of a small, old wooden building. In front of him, another man stands beside a pickup truck parked next to a gas station pump. On the right, a tall red sign reads "Mariposa Motel".|The central setting of Tender Mercies was chosen largely due to the lack of physical structures in the barren landscape around it. A sense of loneliness was crucial to how director Bruce Beresford wanted to tell the story. The filmmakers eventually decided on a property that had been sitting abandoned by a [[Waxahachie, Texas|Waxahachie highway. Mary Ann Hobel said the owner, when approached about its availability, immediately handed over the keys: "We said, 'Don't you want a contract, something in writing?' And he said, 'We don't do things that way here.

Beresford, known for carefully planning every shot in his films, drew his own storyboards as well as detailed drawings of how he envisioned the sets. Beresford chose Australian Russell Boyd as cinematographer and Irishman William Anderson, who had worked on all of the director's previous features, as editor. He selected Elizabeth McBride as costume designer. It was her first time in the position on a feature film, and she went on to build a reputation for costuming Texan and other Southern characters.

Casting

thumb|right|alt=A black-and-white image of a bearded man wearing a baseball cap, sitting on the front porch of a wooden house, with his right arm around a smiling woman wearing a sweater, and his left arm around a smiling young boy sitting on his lap.|Tess Harper as Rosa Lee, Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge, and Allan Hubbard as Sonny, in costumes designed by Elizabeth McBride

Duvall had always wanted to play a country singer, and Foote was rumored to have written the role of Mac Sledge specifically for him. Foote denied the claim, claiming he found it too constraining to write roles for specific actors, although he did hope Duvall would be cast in the part. Tender Mercies became a very important personal project for Duvall, who contributed a significant number of ideas for his character. Reportedly, Duvall dropped out of the movie when Altman would not let him sing his own compositions.

In preparing for the role, he spent weeks roaming around Texas, speaking to strangers to find the right accent and mannerisms. He also joined a small country band and continued singing with them every free weekend while the film was being shot. In total, Duvall drove about to research the part, often asking people to speak into his tape recorder so he could practice their inflections and other vocal habits.

Tess Harper was performing on stage in Texas when she attended a casting call for a minor role in the film. Beresford was so impressed with her that he cast her in the lead. He later said that the actresses he had seen before her demonstrated a sophistication and worldliness inappropriate for the part, while she brought a kind of rural quality without coming across as simple or foolish. Beresford said of Harper, "She walked into the room and even before she spoke, I thought, 'That's the girl to play the lead. Tender Mercies was Harper's feature film debut, and she was so excited about the role she bit her script to make sure it was real.

Beresford visited several schools and auditioned many children for the role of Sonny before he came across Allan Hubbard in Paris, Texas. Beresford said Hubbard, like Harper, was chosen based on a simple, rural quality he possessed. None of the filmmakers knew Hubbard's father had died until after filming began. Duvall said of Barkin, "She brings a real credibility for that part, plus she was young and attractive and had a certain sense of edge, a danger for her that was good for that part."

Wilford Brimley was cast at the urging of his good friend Duvall, who was not getting along well with Beresford and wanted "somebody down here that's on my side, somebody that I can relate to". Beresford largely avoided the Victorian architecture and other picturesque elements of Waxahachie and instead focused on relatively barren locations more characteristic of West Texas. The town portrayed in the film is never identified by name. Foote said when he wrote the script he did not have the same isolated and lonely vision for the setting Beresford did, but he felt the atmosphere the director captured served the story well. Due to the tight schedule, the cast and crew worked seven days a week with very long hours each day. Although the Australian filmmakers and the crew, who were mostly from Dallas, got along very well both on and off the set,

Beresford also clashed on set with Brimley. On the very first day of filming, he asked the actor to "pick up the pace", prompting Brimley to reply, "Hey, I didn't know anybody dropped it." Beresford, Foote and Duvall considered the climactic scene to be the one in which Mac, tending the family garden, discusses with Rosa Lee his pain over his daughter's death. Beresford and Boyd filmed the scene in a long take and long shot so it could flow uninterrupted, with the lonely Texas landscape captured in the background. When studio executives received the footage, they contacted Beresford and requested close-up shots be intercut, but he insisted on keeping the long take intact. Duvall said he felt the scene underscored Mac's stoicism in the face of tragedy and loss. Several leading country singers, including Willie Nelson, George Jones and Merle Haggard, were believed to have inspired Mac and Duvall's portrayal of him, but Duvall insisted the character was not based on anyone in particular. Another country star, Waylon Jennings, complimented his performance, saying he had "done the impossible."

Betty Buckley also sang her own songs, one of which, "Over You", written by Austin Roberts and Bobby Hart, was nominated for an Academy Award. and Mac Davis later sang it at the 1984 Academy Awards ceremony. Other songs in the film include "It Hurts to Face Reality" by Lefty Frizzell, "If You'll Hold the Ladder (I'll Climb to the Top)" by Buzz Rabin and Sara Busby, "The Best Bedroom in Town" and "Champagne Ladies & Barroom Babies" by Charlie Craig, "I'm Drinkin' Canada Dry" by Johnny Cymbal and Austin Roberts, and "You Are What Love Means To Me" by Craig Bickhardt.