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. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Tender Mercies”