Don't Make a Scene: Tender Mercies

The Story: Sometimes scenes can be so simple that they hit you like a fist.

This is one shot. One complete "take." Of course, the studio—seeing it—asked for close-up's, or "coverage", but somehow the scene was left alone.

Close-up's might have shown you that Duvall's character of Mac Sledge is crying during this scene and trying to hold it together. Now, it's subtle things that tell you, like the tremor in his voice, or the raspy intake of breath, a single swipe at the eye, turning away.

 

And Tess Harper's Rosa can only listen. She has no answers. All she can do is be with the man she loves and sympathize. Be there. John Wayne once joked that he never acted in movies, he reacted. Harper is a study in that here, never taking away from Duvall's scene, but directing focus to it.

 

And director Beresford's subtle dance around the scene, moving everything out of frame but the two people, and slowly, slowly moving closer—but not too close. He ignores Horton Foote's action to make the scene warmer by having them embrace. Sledge continues with his tending his garden. It's the only thing he can do in an indifferent Universe.

 

Take care of his own.

The Set-Up: Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall in an Oscar-winning performance) used to be somebody in country music. A well-regarded songwriter, he spent all his money on "apple-jack" and wound up drunk and wasted at a Texas filling station run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a war widow with a son. Mac sobers up and even starts writing again, but the past still haunts in the form of his ex-wife country star Dixie (Betty Buckley) and his daughter (whom he hasn't seen since she was a baby), Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin).

Action.

He (ROBERT) drives off. ROSA LEE goes around back to MAC.

ROSA LEE: Mac?

ROSA: You okay? 

MAC SLEDGE: I was almost killed once in a car accident. 

MAC: I was drunk and... 

MAC: I ran off the side of the road and turned over four times, 

MAC: and they took me out of that car for dead. But I lived. 

MAC: And I prayed last night to know why I lived and she died, 

MAC: but I got no answer to my prayers. 

MAC: I still don't know why she died and I lived. 

MAC: I don't know the answer to nothing. Not a blessed thing. 

MAC: I don't know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, 

MAC: and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, marry me. 

MAC: Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened?

MAC: And Sonny's daddy died in the war, 

MAC: my daughter killed in an automobile accident. 

MAC: Why? 

MAC: See, I don't trust happiness. 

MAC: I never did, I never will. 

MAC looks up at the sky. HE looks across the fields. ROSA LEE watches him anxiously. Then she goes to him and holds him. In the distance we hear the school bus. SHE looks up and sees the school bus drive up the road and stop as SONNY gets off. SHE walks around the house to him.

Tender Mercies

Words by Horton Foote

Pictures by Russell Boyd and Bruce Beresford

Tender Mercies is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Anchor Bay Entertainment and Kino Lorber Studio Classics.