Tender Mercies | Robert Duvall, Tess Harper

Tender Mercies | Robert Duvall, Tess Harper | "Tender Mercies" with Robert Duvall

DVDs:

Tender Mercies

	Tender Mercies Robert Duvall, Tess Harper Starz / Anchor Bay, 2002 average customer review:based on 53 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

God's tender mercies

Excellent film. Wonderful acting. Outstanding script about grace and redemption. One of my all time favorites.

"Tender Mercies" with Robert Duvall

This is the movie that he won his FIRST academy award for filmed in Seven Points Texas where he got to sing for the first time in his career at Cedar Creek Plowboys Club owned by Reba Anderson. This movie has a lot of meaning behind it and its a real cowboy type movie where he is down on his luck...divorce...coping with day to day from alcohol. Its a GREAT A++++ Movie...

Tender Mercies

A genuine sleeper! Robert Duvall's performance is impeccable as Mac. A great supporting cast. A small classic. Genuine "Must See"

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A quiet drama set in Texas

A movie so low-key that it seems at times as empty as the Texas landscape it's filmed on. Robert Duvall is Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer who spends two drunken nights in a rundown motel on the Texas prairie, and then stays on and eventually marries the owner (Tess Harper). The story is told in fast cuts, in bits and pieces, with so much left out that even the characters don't know each other. There is something effective about it, though, at least on the surface, especially Duvall's quiet performance, that makes it enjoyable. The scene where Duvall's estranged daughter (played by Ellen Barkin) visits him and asks him to sing a song he used to sing to her as a little girl and he tells her he doesn't remember it, but as soon as she leaves he sings it to himself, is heartbreaking. And at the end Harper has that unsure look on her face, as she watches Duvall and her son (Allan Hubbard) toss a football around, indicating she knows anything still might happen in their relationship. A great little movie written by Horton Foote. Definitely worth a watch.

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Spawned Some Knockoffs

Tender Mercies from 1983 has spawned some knockoffs, made for TV films that you see on the Country Cable station. TM is still one of the best portrayals of poor Texas brush folks on flat, flat terrain. Sometimes tumbleweed tumbles by. Anyhow, one looks at that big sky and a country song comes to your lips. Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge stoically in tight blue jeans and cowboy boots. Duvall slips off the Godfather set and takes that Texas accent where men sort of mumble homily's at a moments notice. Ah, he can't sing, but he gets a nice voiceover during a honky tonk gig.

So former country star Duval has fallen hard, but ends up at a rural Austin motel to take up with Tess Harper, a widow of the Vietnam War. Her young son needs a father. The ready made family makes do with gas station revenue while Duval dries out. Local citizens, boys in a garage band lure the has-been songwriter back into the music business. Former wife Trixie still hates his drunken ways and won't let Mac connect with his young daughter, teen Ellen Barker. After that, there's a tragedy.

I watched TM with a teen daughter and we enjoyed it. We're not talking Fellini or Welles here, but it kept me interested.

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