Robert Duvall, Tender Mercies, and a sense of place
Slow pacing becomes hauntingly beautiful when a film lets the land do some of the talking. Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall, pulls that off as well as any film I can think of. I’m not sure the story ever pins itself to a specific dot on the Texas map, but it’s unmistakably rural, small-town, wide-horizon Texas, where the land feels like it presses you down into the earth. It reinforces that we’re small, and the world is big.
As a fan of Duvall, especially given his masterful performance in The Apostle, I always figured I needed to watch Tender Mercies at some point in my life. Released in 1983, I didn’t actually see it until roughly 30 years later. I waited way too long.
Early in the film it’s clear that the landscape is unmistakably flat and desolate. I bet the director being an Australian helped stress that a little. Just a hunch. I’m pretty sure that a few directors and American studios passed on the gem of a film. It was released with little fanfare, was a box-office flop, but Duvall ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. It holds up remarkably for the simple fact its goal is unearthing a kind of authenticity seldom seen in so many modern films.
The cinematography and land offers up that lonesome quality I love. That visual sparseness lends itself to an important part of the story: if your life has been reduced to the essentials, maybe it can help you face the truth. It’s interesting that the story centers on characters whose lives have been shattered by brokenness. Both are marked by deep wounds: Mac Sledge’s alcoholism and past failures, and Rosa Lee’s loss of her husband, Sonny’s father, in the Vietnam War.
I won’t really delve into the story of Sledge, Rosa Lee, and Sonny, but a few years back I drove all the way across Texas and it was haunting and beautiful in its desolation after you start to really get west of Ft. Worth. The wide open space and the way the sun sets against the oil rigs and windmills. The lonesome quality reminded me in different ways of the Mississippi Delta and parts of Appalachia. Isolation has a way of nudging one deep in thought and contemplating life more deeply.
The landscape isn’t the most significant aspect of the film, but it matters because place has a way of making stories more real and immediate. You can hear an echo of that in an upcoming interview in our next issue with Kansas state Rep. Rebecca Schmoe. And in the issue after that, American Habits will attempt to pull some more threads together on how a rooted life, among particular people in a particular place, still has the power to explain something about the way we live.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat