Tender Mercies (1983)

Directed by Bruce Beresford

In this week dedicated to healing, we’d like to look again at “Tender Mercies,” which shows that we can still have a great film without a single off-color word, and without any cheap sentimentality. It takes intelligence, and maybe faith in more than what people alone can do for themselves.

A country singer named Mac Sledge – and if that isn’t a name of a country singer, I don’t know what is – a drunk and out of money and luck, shows up at a small motel and gas station in the plains of Texas.  All is grassland and sun and sky, as far as the eye can see.  There’s only a young woman and her ten-year-old son who live at the place.  She’s a widow.  The boy she married when she was still in her teens was killed in Vietnam, when their child was a baby.  Outdoors you can always hear the rush of the wind, as it’s a lonely land, impressive in a stark and austere way, and even beautiful.  The widow (Tess Harper) and the man struggling to come back into a human life (Robert Duvall, who won an Oscar for his role) fall in love, quietly, almost without words, and they marry.  That is not the end of the story, but the beginning.

If this film were being shot now, you can bet that when several young men one day show up at the gas station in their beat-up truck, and look around furtively, they’d be casing the joint, and violence would be in the offing.  And then the new Mrs. Sledge would do a sudden roundhouse kick or something else that’s silly.  But as it turns out, they’re just looking for Mr. Sledge, because they’re a country band, and they’d like his help, and maybe his voice, too.  Mac is wary of the invitation, but gratified by it.  If he goes back to singing, would he go back also to the life that nearly ruined him?  Would he go back to the world that heaps riches and renown on his ex-wife Dixie (Betty Buckley), herself a singer, but an unhappy woman for all that?  It isn’t just that Mac has turned over a new leaf.  Anybody can do that.  He has been baptized, in a full-body tank at his wife Rosa Lee’s church.  And it is also not just fame that beckons him to leave those plains.  Tragedy does so too – terrible suffering, which I won’t describe, because I don’t want to spoil the plot for you.

If you like country music, this is a film you can’t miss.  But the director, Bruce Beresford, was an Australian. How could he know the American south and its music?  He could, because the best of country music, whereof we get plenty here, is about the elemental things in human life.  “I put no trust in happiness,” says Mac to Rosa Lee as he is hoeing vegetables in their dry little garden, and he tries hard not to weep.  But he also sings, quietly, looking out of a window, the words to the gospel hymn “On the Wings of a Dove.”  A man in the outback would understand, not because he is in the outback, but because he is a man: made in the image of God, by God, for God. And how would you express that? Maybe in song. Maybe also, as Beresford suggests, in what a stepfather and the stepson he loves do on a breezy day in that lonely land, tossing a football back and forth. Maybe that’s when you know you have been healed: when you are in your soul as innocent as a boy, tossing a football with Dad, against the setting sun.

The title for the film, Tender Mercies, comes from Scripture, where the English translates an untranslatable word in Hebrew, racham, suggesting the softness of compassion, such as a mother might have for her child.  In Luke’s gospel, when the mouth of the priest Zachariah is opened again and he sings out his poem in praise of God, he describes the role his son John is to play, “to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (1:77-79).  That might well describe also what mysteriously comes to Mac Sledge, not as the icing of sentiment on a sweet cake, but in and through suffering itself, and penitence, and the joy of a love that earth alone cannot know.  Horton Foote, who won an Oscar for his screenplay (as he did also for “To Kill a Mockingbird”), taught Sunday school teacher at his church, and Robert Duvall, who to my mind is the most versatile and deeply human actor in America in the last sixty years, is and has always been a believer in God.

And that’s the key here.  What Mac wants, what Rosa Lee wants, whether they can express it or not, is what all men have been made for.  It isn’t just a bit of money, a nice place to live, some friends, and a good notice or two in the paper or on the radio.  It is no less than salvation, which is no other than what the psalmist desires: “Thy face, O Lord, do I seek.”