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's interest in filmmaking was dependent the condition that he maintain some degree of control over the final product. He 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."
The story was inspired partially by Foote's nephew, who struggled to succeed in the country music business. Foote was initially interested in writing a film based on his nephew's efforts to organise a band, which he saw as paralleling his own youthful attempts to find work as an actor. During his research, however, he met an experienced musician who had offered to help his nephew's band, and Foote found himself growing more interested in a story about him, rather than the band itself.. 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." The moment in the film where a woman asks, "Were you really Mac Sledge?" and he responds, "Yes ma'am, I guess I was," was based on an exchange that Foote overheard between a washed-up star and a fan. Foote said the entire film pivots on that statement, which he believed spoke volumes about Mac's personality and former status..
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. Foote described his protagonist as "a very hurt, damaged man ... silence was his weapon". 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". Foote sought to portray each character as realistic and flawed, but not unsympathetic. Although the script conveyed a strong spiritual message with religious undertones, Foote felt it was important to balance those religious elements with a focus on the practical challenges of everyday life.
Film historian Gary Edgerton said the Tender Mercies script "catapulted Horton Foote into the most active professional period in his life." Film director and producer Alan J. Pakula credited the script with helping define the American independent film movement of the late 1980s by initiating a trend of personal filmmaking that often looks beyond Hollywood conventions..
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.
Foote took the script to Philip and Mary Ann Hobel, a married couple who ran Antron Media Production and had produced more than 200 documentaries between them. Foote felt their background in documentaries would lend Tender Mercies the authenticity he and Duvall were seeking. The Hobels agreed to produce it after reading and liking the script; it would become their feature film debut as producers. The Hobels approached EMI Films, a British film and television production company, which agreed to provide financing for Tender Mercies as long as Duvall remained involved, and under the condition the Hobels find a good director.. 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." The Hobels eventually mailed the script to Australian director Bruce Beresford because they were impressed by his 1980 film Breaker Morant. Philip Hobel said, "What we saw in Breaker Morant is what we like as filmmakers ourselves — an attention to the environment, a straightforward presentation; it's almost a documentary approach."