The Films That Made Me a Writer, Pt. 1: Tender Mercies

Often the best drama is the most quiet.

(There will be slight spoilers about this film in the writing ahead; also, each video clip is about two minutes long)

Last week I had the great honor of watching my favorite film, Tender Mercies, with one of its stars, the wonderful Tess Harper, on the big screen, and then having a public conversation with her about it. More about that in a bit, but first I want to tell you that that event got me thinking about how much cinema has contributed to my life as a writer, so I want to start a series where I talk about some of my favorite films and give you my perspectives on why I love them so much. My hope is to not only offer you my thoughts on them but to also give you direction/links to other analyses or discussions of the films.

First up: Tender Mercies.

When Tender Mercies came out in 1983 the studio didn’t know what to do with it and only played it in a handful of cinemas. Star and co-producer Robert Duvall claims the studio’s lack of interest was because of their inability to understand Southern culture and country music. But it received plenty of awards attention, including garnering five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Although a box office bomb, it became widely watched on HBO the year after it was made and eventually found a whole new audience once video rentals began. Before long it became a word-of-mouth sensation and is now considered a classic. You can find more details and analysis of the film here.

I was eleven when the movie came out and although I can’t remember for sure I probably found it through my aunt, Sis, who was my main source of movies and who loved country music so much that she would have probably rented it based on its thumbnail description: A broken-down country singer tries to put his troubled life back together. There was a little gas station, McClure’s, just up the road from her house, that kept a rotating dozen or so VHS tapes they rented out. We would have gotten it there. McClure’s also had the best cheeseburgers, with an entire slice of sweet onion, the freshest buns, and juicy tomatoes that always seemed to be so fresh they must have been plucked from the garden out back. But I digress.

I don’t recall the first time I saw it but I know that I’ve seen it many times and that by my mid-twenties I considered it my favorite film.

I love Tender Mercies for the way it uses quiet, for its wide shots of the lonesome Texas landscape, for its use of color (vibrant reds appear throughout, often juxtaposed with the brown fields and the drab colors worn by Harper’s character), for its subtle, understated performances, for its perfect screenplay, containing dialogue that is simultaneously rich, poetic, and sparse, even often monosyllabic. I love the way it shows people of faith in a nonjudgemental light. I especially love the way it portrays rural characters as complex human beings, something that is very rare in movies. Of course I love its sense of place as well. The place serves the story throughout.

Let me pause here to pay proper homage to its screenwriter, Horton Foote, who is best known as a playwright but who also wrote three of the most perfect screenplays ever: Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful (a film I’ll surely discuss here eventually). Early on in my writing career I was in the same room with him, at a reception for the Fellowship of Southern Writers, where I was being given an award. I was actually only about six feet away from him at one point and I was so overwhelmed by my admiration for him that I was unable to approach him and thank him for his writing. This was about six or seven years before he passed away. I’ve regretted not speaking to him ever since. (Note: if you ever have the chance to thank an artist for how they’ve enriched your life, do it) He remains a literary hero to me. You can see a brief interview with him talking about the origins of Tender Mercies here.

I believe watching Tender Mercies is one of the best writing lessons any writer can have because it teaches us how much we can do with what is unsaid. It reminds me to use colors in my writing and to have colors—and a color scheme—in mind even if that doesn’t show up on the page. It reminds me to always have the landscape of the place in my mind when writing, to embrace effective, understated dialogue over explosive talking. It shows writers how everything must serve the story at hand. One thing the film is known for is that scenes don’t really resolve. It’s unusual and disorienting but also haunting and effective. In this incredibly powerful two minute scene, Duvall’s character, Mack Sledge, pours his heart out to his wife after the death of his daughter and at the end of the scene she…walks away. Watch, and then we’ll discuss further.

What I love about her reaction is not that she is being dismissive or unkind. The character, Rosa Lee, is simply doing what she does so beautifully throughout: she is letting him be. She is giving him his space to grieve and not making it about her. Some audience members find it to be a strange response to his monologue but to me it epitomizes what is so wonderful about her character. Watch here for an excellent breakdown of this scene.

During our conversation after the screening at the Kentucky Theatre, I asked Harper about creating Rosa Lee. She told me that the main thing she did was write this on her script: “But Mary kept all these things in her heart”, from Luke 2:19. She said that she is not one who usually quotes scripture but it seemed to be a good guide for how to deliver this character. After she told me this I can see that throughout the film her character is often watching from afar, tucking away little wonderful moments. As in what is perhaps the most famous scene from the film, when Mack is talking with his stepson Sonny and showing him chords on the guitar (“D as in dawg”):

All the while, Rosa Lee is working in the background, as she often does throughout the film (she is almost always working: ironing, folding clothes, pumping gas), but she’s also taking everything in as she works. In this scene she’s appreciating how her son has come to admire his stepfather. The very last scene focuses on Sonny and Mack throwing a football to each other on the barren Texas plains but then our attention shifts to Rosa Lee, watching from behind a screen door. The look on her face assures us: everything is going to be alright. That look is all we need as an audience that has invested our time in characters we come to care for deeply in only ninety minutes. Now, with all of this said it may come across that Harper’s character is simply the watching housewife, a thankless supporting role that is so often given to women in films. But in fact Rosa Lee is the beating heart of the film. She is the tender mercy that is given to those who need it throughout. But Harper chooses to never play her as treacly or mealy-mouthed. She shows that tenderness can often be entwined with toughness. She’s firm, strong, sometimes seemingly emotionless, but always full of grace and mercy. And it’s important to point out that although I’m not showing them here, she gets several wonderful scenes where she is holding forth and not just watching in the background. Watch an old interview here with her talking about Rosa Lee and the film.

Tender Mercies is perhaps most widely known as Duvall’s greatest performance (watch him talk about it here) and while I agree that is is a thing of rare beauty, I am just as blown away by Harper’s quiet and nuanced portrayal of Rosa Lee. She told me that she felt she was able to play her so effectively because Rosa Lee is such a rural, working class character, and Harper had been raised as rural and working class herself. She’s from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, after all. As a writer who is always seeking to complexity and even understand rural characters in my work, this is important to me. As someone who believes that rural working class people are often negated and even erased from most American media these days—even literature—this is important to me. And Harper is ethereal throughout the film, with skin that fairly glows and bright blue eyes to which the camera is always drawn. As Rosa Lee she is beatific, which of course makes sense when we know her ultimate motivation for the character is Mary, the mother of Christ.

You may know Tess Harper from Crimes of the Heart (her performance captured her an Oscar nomination in 1986), The Man in the Moon (1991), No Country for Old Men (2007) or “Breaking Bad” but my other favorite role she created was in the beautiful film Loggerheads (2005), where she gives a complex performance as a woman torn between her duties as a preacher’s wife and being the mother of a gay son. It’s a hidden gem, she’s excellent in it, and if you love a good Southern family drama filled with great performances and a lovely script, you should check out.

I’ll share one more scene with you because it’s one of my favorites, and because it shows how effectively Foote uses dialogue. It’s efficient but full of emotion. In the scene, Mack’s estranged daughter is visiting him unexpectedly, and she makes a surprising request. Look at what is not said and how economically things that are said are stated.

Also, of course, look at the lovely performance from a very young Ellen Barkin who more than holds her own with her scene partner, the accomplished Duvall. I have been thinking a lot about this scene in particular as I have tried to process the way contemporary TV shows so often rely on the explosive to get across emotion instead of using the more realistic introspection, quiet, and even silence. So many TV shows today, for example, believe the only way to express anger is through a character using the most insulting, vulgar language as possible, often leaving me to feel beaten up. Nearly everyone in contemporary television is so angry all the time. It wears me out. Just look at a few minutes of shows like “The Bear”, “Beef”, “The Perfect Couple”, or practically anything on the big streamers. Often it is simply lazy writing, and it shows up so much in today’s streaming television. It cheapens drama when a writer only uses the explosive. Tender Mercies shows how real drama is most powerfully shown in what is not said, in reactions that rely on silence from the actor instead of vomiting strings of attention-seeking dialogue that is meant to shock but in its constancy has only become boring.

I suppose some people don’t like Tender Mercies because of that quiet. Yet to me that is one of its best qualities, along with the aforementioned performances, sense of place, and screenplay. I love it because it reminds me of the way people I grew up around talked to each other and acted with each other. I love it because it feels real to me. It feels honest. And that’s what I want from a piece of art.

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FYI: Tender Mercies is now available to watch for free with a subscription to Amazon Prime.