Tender Mercies

A broken-down, middle-aged country singer gets a new wife, reaches out to his long-lost daughter, and tries to put his troubled life back together.

• Director
  • Bruce Beresford
• Writer
  • Horton Foote
• Stars
  • Robert Duvall
  • Tess Harper
  • Betty Buckley

The film is slow and in fact very sensible. Beside the main issue of the story, the human relationship based on emotions, hope and deceptions, the movie has a very strong and quite subtle politic position; a very pacifist one. The author uses a very discreet way of the Vietnam war criticism, showing the perception of the dead soldiers, the child who lost his father or the way people talk about his death like it’s kind of fuzzy and mundane. They don’t even know exactly how and why He, the American soldier and the child’s father, died.