I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

What makes it different from others?

Awesome Movie

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

An endearing portrait of a weather-beaten American country musician Mac Sledge (Duvall), who takes the pledge and plumps for an ordinary life with his new wife Rose Lee (Harper) in the sticks. Australian director Bruce Beresford's first Hollywood outing emphatically breaks his duck by inducing an Oscar-crowning tour-de-force from a wonderfully amiable Robert Duvall, and what is more at a premium is the film's unpretentious tonality and lyrical felicity which stirs up an aptly authentic reverberations among its viewers, out of the story's sensible universality and abstention from small-town provincialism. Fetching up in a motel in a middle-of-nowhere Texas, the lush Mac is broke and has to pay off his staying by working for the motel owner, that happens to be Rose Lee, a young widow who has lost her husband in the Vietnam war and now runs the motel with her school-age son Sonny (Hubbard, this is his sole screen credit but he is down right sympathetic). A down-to-earth union takes its shape in due course and that is the blissful family life a man and a woman (and a fatherless child) could ever dream of. Meantime, Mac's backstory trickles alongside his new-found happiness, his ex-wife Dixie Scott (Buckley, shrilly shines in her Dolly Parton-inflected singing bent and edgy streak) is still a highly demanded touring singer feeding off on songs Mac wrote for her, and Mac has been proscribed from seeing their daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin's second film credit), now in a troubled age of 18, ever since the inimical divorce (whose raison d'être entails alcoholism and domestic violence). So naturally, there are some fences needed mending, and through tacit love, old/new friendship and religion (not pedagogic but with a waft of sincere communion), Mac will eventually get hold of the most precious values about love, loss, family and life itself (past and present), they are mundanely traditional, but gleaming with a patina of poetic finesse under Beresford's sober and unobtrusive execution (you might anticipate an old soak's inevitable interlude of backsliding, which would serve as a jolting plot swerve, but nonetheless, that doesn't need to happen every time in a movie's plot!), which elevates this gem from other blasé offerings replete with lachrymosity and/or melancholia.The film is based on American playwright Horton Foote's tender-hearted and unaffected script (also reaped an Oscar), his very first original screenplay if truth be told, and there is no dispute on Mr. Duvall's quietly touching impersonation of a country singer in his own raw voice, like Mac's persona, his musical rendition is also mostly touching when he is simply strumming and humming inside his homestead, music should always have its self-pleasing precept before becoming a crowd-pleasing commodity. However, it is utterly remiss that Tess Harper is hardly hailed for her equally brilliant turn (a Golden Globe nomination is the solitary consolation, but she is leading in my book), an immaculate screen debut, her Rose Lee exemplifies a woman who truly understands how to tame a jaded soul and wills herself to stand behind her imperfect husband and support him through the vagaries, it is such a rare performance completely devoid of pretension and self- awarenss, her tranquil gaze magnificently rounds off this essential small-tale-with-a-big-heart boon, a slam-dunk melodrama.

Red State America never got treated better than in Tender Mercies. It's a simple and sublime story of a former country singing star trying to pick up the pieces of his life.At one time Robert Duvall was one of the biggest names in country music with an appetite for life's pleasures to match. There's an opening flashback scene where we see a frightened Betty Buckley both trying to get away from a raging and drunken Duvall and protecting their little girl at the same time.As Duvall has drifted into obscurity Buckley has grown into a big country Loretta Lynn/Patsy Cline type superstar. Now with her taking her tour into the area of Texas the two are destined to meet.Duvall is now married to a woman who owns a small motel and filling station and he's a loving stepdad to young Allyn Hubbard. Tess Harper and Duvall are happy but both have a lot of stuff that is unsaid that gets said during the course of the film. Duvall also has now reunited with his daughter Ellen Barkin who may have inherited talent from both ends of the gene pool.Tender Mercies is simple and profound with not a false note struck either in the singing or the acting. You will rarely see a performance as profound and as underplayed as Duvall's is this side of Spencer Tracy. Small wonder he was the Best Actor Oscar winner. Horton Foote's original screenplay also won the other Oscar that Tender Mercies took home.If you're a country music fan you'll love this film and for Robert Duvall fans it's a must.

I won't go into describing the plot because so many other people already have, but there's one thing that I don't think anyone else has touched on and I wanted to give my opinion on it.If you look at the two women in Mac Sledge's life, that's where you'll see the point of the whole story.Rosa lost her young husband to a war not long after they got married and could never find out how or even when he died. She speaks matter-of-factly about it now but she spent many years raising a son alone, doing what she could to put food on the table. She owns a run-down gas station/motel in the middle of nowhere and has practically nothing of monetary value, yet she thanks God for His tender mercies toward her.Dixie, on the other hand, is rich and famous. Even tho she too was a single mother she gave her daughter "everything money could buy." And when her daughter is killed, Dixie cries, "Why has God done this to ME?" We can only hope that, as his life with Rosa continues, Mac eventually learns to accept -- and trust -- happiness in small doses.

Mack Sledge is a former country music star, now living in a bottle, who rocks up at a Texas Motel, owned by Tess Harper. When he emerges from his cabin two days later, fresh from a drunken stupor, he realises that the friend who came with him has left him there with no money, and with a bill to pay. This is the story of how earning his keep at the Motel gives him the chance to earn some self respect, and to receive acceptance. His relationship with Harper's son, Sonny (Allan J. Hubbard) is an allegory for him being forgiven past mistakes, as it seems that he is the judge of this man's worthiness. Wonderfully evocative of an old country world. Robert Duvall is a revelation as a singer, and Betty Buckley is a vocal powerhouse as Mack's ex-wife. Take the time to relax with this film.