Screen:

...It's not just with strangers that Mac seems to be speaking of somebody else when he talks about himself...

...She lets him work off the damages, and then let's him stay on to pull himself together again...

...Fentry was a man whose life was so limited and elemental, it was almost beneath language...

...yet the movie contains very little singing...

...Still, there is some glimmer of recognition in Mac's face...

...Even with Rosa Lee he has this paradoxical way, this circumspect directness...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...

...This was of a William Falukner short story entitled Tomorrow...

...The film they've made is Tender Mercies, and the character of the country-Western singer that Foote's original screenplay contains is yet another elaboration upon the first role Duvall ever played in a movie...

...Communicating the characters of these taciturn men required Duvall to work in many sub-textual ways...

...Although reluctant to talk about the past, he responds to these strangers openly...

...Duvall manages to suggest beneath Mac's terseness a great stoicism and strength of character...

...Since he has returned to this role every ten years or so, enlarging it each time, you might say that it is a benchmark by which he has been measuring his career...

...His ex-wife has kept them apart, and now Mac is remarried...

...The songs left unsung and the words unspoken are all signs of his substance...

...Duvall has a wonderful capacity to imply the presence of a feeling without giving away what it is...

...She has a dim memory of being sung a song with a part about a dove in it: didn't he used to sing that to her...

...Duvall played the lead role of a poor Mississippian who falls in love with an abandoned, pregnant girl...

...After she has left, he stands by the window, his face turned away from us, and in a flat, toneless voice sings "On the Wings of a Dove...

...The same is true of all his experiences...

...Even as Mac's words dismiss his daughter's memory, something in his tone and look acknowledge it...

...In this scene, especially, Mac reminded me of Jackson Fentry, the Mississippian Duvall played eleven years ago in Tomorrow...

...This "tender mercy" she shows him is what inspires the song, so there's a certain irony, and something rather poignant, in the fact that he tries to get his first wife, who's still on top as a singer, to record it...

...What "it" refers to-whether it's only the money or also his talent he fears he's lost-is unclear...

...Tender Mercies is, as this scene suggests, a movie about songs unsung...

...I suspect that these are not the roles of which Duvall himself thinks first, however...

...This exchange seems to be just the last of many missteps in their reunion, a final and rather minor failure of memory to make up for absence...

...Yes, he had money and fame as a singer once, but now he's "lost it...

...This gives them a power they wouldn't have had on a concert stage, for it gives them an intimate, reticent quality appropriate to the emotions people feel in this film...

...But now Duvall and Horton Foote have teamed up once more, this time with Australian director Bruce Beresford...

...It is the less noisy roles of Bo in Mockingbird and Jackson Fentry in Tomorrow, and now Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, in which Duvall takes the greatest pride...

...They presented the greatest challenge to him as an actor...

...It's become a bit of an Eden for them, a place where their innocence with each other is renewed...

...He's not a character out of Altman's Nashville, a cynical pop star of the type we may suspect most country-Western singers to be today...

...As the movie opens, she's standing outside one of the cabins she rents next to her gas station on a Texas highway...

...The adaptation of Harper Lee's novel for the film was written by Horton Foote, and nine years later, around the time that Duvall was achieving national recognition as the loyal, ruthless consigliari in The Godfather, he and Foote worked together again on another adaptation...

...She is a widow, and after he has worked as her hired hand a while, he asks her whether she has ever thought of remarrying - not marrying him, just remarrying...

...A lot has happened for which Mac cannot understand "the reason why," but just asking the questions is a way to work through the pain he's in...

...That's why he can't sing the one his daughter remembers, and also why he is hesitant about going back to doing in public the songs he writes...

...We realize here what we have been seeing all along: that Mac lives his life with a solemnity and formality, a deference to life itself, of which only the poor seem to be capable...

...It's about a country and Western singer who hasn't performed in a long time...

...At the time, they're standing in a vegetable garden they keep together behind the cabins...

...The rhetorical nature of the questions gives the scene a ritual quality...

...This quiet, simple character might almost have been an enlargement upon the one Duvall had played in Mockingbird...

...In the course of the plot, he makes a comeback...

...Except for one occasion near the film's end, his songs are sung only in bits and pieces in the soft, untrained monotone of Duvall's own voice...

...It had much the same subtance that Mac Sledge's has...

...At the same time that his songs touch him too closely, they are something about which he is very detached...

...On the contrary, certain songs mean almost too much to him...

...When he comes to, he can't pay the bill...

...It's called" You're the Only Dream I' ve Ever Had," and it's about Mac's second wife Rosa Lee (Tess Harper...

...He says that, no, he doesn't know anything about it, maybe it was somebody else...

...The meeting is awkward, hesitant, tentative...

...But there is in his straightforward manner a touch of sadness and wisdom, of resignation, as if he were talking about someone else's troubles instead of his own...

...That he should take such a disinterested view of a song he had to go through so much pain to write is also typical of him...

...The best scene in Tender Mercies is one where Mac is reunited with his daughter (Ellen Barkin) whom he hasn't seen in years...

...Nor does he press her for the answer by the scene's end...

...Although he doesn't take the revivalist church that Rosa Lee attends very seriously, he is, as they might say, "bearing witness" to his own life...

...Screen UNSUNG HEROES ROBERT DUVALL IN TENDER MERCIES' IN 1963 ROBERT DUVALL made his first screen appearance in To Kill A Mockingbird, where he played the harmless idiot of whom the children were so frightened...

...One day a reporter comes into the gas station hoping to get an interview from Mac: next it's a group of young musicians who want to pay their respects and tell him how much his songs meant to them...

...Inside, Mac is involved in a drunken brawl in which he hits bottom so hard he doesn't bounce...

...He looks away as he does so, masking his shyness as a general speculation, as if he thought he'd get an answer by gazing off into the distance rather than from her...

...This question is posed near the beginning of the film, during a prelude of elliptical scenes that establish their relationship...

...But then she thinks of one thing more she wants to say...

...They're back in that garden again at the film's conclusion...

...When Duvall's name is mentioned, the roles that probably pop into our minds first are those of the swaggering military officers he has played in recent years-the Air-Cav veteran who parades up and down a beach under fire in Apocalypse Now, or the Great Santini, in the film of the same name, who drives his family as hard as he does the fighter-bombers he flies for a living...

...Again, he sounds almost as if he's talking about someone else, or meditating on life in general rather than his personal sorrows...

...This is not because the music doesn't mean anything to Mac...

...In a way, Tender Mercies is the story of a single song...

...After he's married Rosa Lee, that's the only way he can think of to bring a little money into the house...

...At last his daughter gets up to leave...

...It received only limited distribution upon release and has practically been forgotten since then...

...Tomorrow was a modest black and white movie...

...And this time Mac is posing imponderable questions to which he doesn't ever expect answers...

...We can see what the words in the song mean to him, even if they do sound, as he himself says at one point, kind of "corny...