Rapid Response: Tender Mercies

If a movie is good enough, you can enjoy any music in it. I’m not a country music fan, but I’ve been an admirer of the filmmaking, performances and sheer charisma on stage in movies like “Walk the Line,” “Crazy Heart” and now “Tender Mercies.” It’s also hard to deny Robert Duvall’s sheer acting presence in any film he’s in, and this is the one he won his Oscar for, despite being one of the most understated performances of his career.

It’s about a former country music star, Mac Sledge, who lost his fame, fortune and family to the bottle and will now try to make a comeback in a way other than just with his music. It did remind me a lot of “Crazy Heart,” as did Duvall’s character in comparison to Jeff Bridges’ (ironically, Bridges won his Oscar for that role as well), but “Tender Mercies” is in many ways better than it. Rather than show Mac’s plummet, we meet Mac at his low point and see him rise from there, and we also don’t know anything about his past, least of all as a country singer. Instead, the movie floors us with his history all at once when a journalist outs his presence in this small Texas town to the world.

There are no cornball scenes of him falling back on alcohol or montages of him writing music again. It doesn’t even devote too much attention to his marriage to Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), but that’s because there’s more to this character than just his surface level problems.

Mac also never fully reveals his emotions to anyone, let alone brag that he’s been clean and sober for months. And director Bruce Beresford honors his integrity by keeping mostly to wide shots as he wanders through his thoughts. Even the musical scenes are detached, distant and often immobile, focusing more on the subtle reactions spotted in the background than on simply the evocation of the performer.

But the songs are all well directed and strike a chord worthy of the film’s nomination for Best Original Song.

As I mentioned, the film for me recalled “Crazy Heart” and the better, less cliche moments of “Walk the Line.” It’s “tenderness” also reminded me how much more delicately Beresford handled the film in comparison to the horribly cheesy and less-than-profound Best Picture winner of his, “Driving Miss Daisy.” And then of course is Duvall, who has a filmography too deep to fully recite, but critics quoted the strong leading man performance in this film when he appeared recently as the lead in the intriguing “Get Low.” It isn’t often that we get commanding work from him like that anymore, so it’s always good to revisit his classics like this one.

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