Tender Mercies

Tender Mercies centers on Mac Sledge, a onetime country music star whose career and marriage have fallen apart and who now drifts through Texas, drinking heavily and sleeping rough. He ends up at a small motel run by Rosa Lee, a young widow raising her son Sonny, and in exchange for his room he begins working around the property. As the three grow close, Mac starts to consider a different kind of life, though his former wife Dixie and the daughter he has not seen for years keep pulling him back toward the past.

Bruce Beresford directed the film, the third of the twenty features he has made to date, following Breaker Morant and preceding King David. Horton Foote wrote the screenplay, and Robert Duvall leads the cast as Mac, with Tess Harper as Rosa Lee, Betty Buckley as Dixie, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin and Allan Hubbard in supporting roles. Made with 46 credited cast and 77 credited crew members, it was a modest production backed by Universal Pictures and EMI Films.

The film was released in March 1983 and took in about 8 million dollars worldwide against a 5 million dollar budget, a return that did little more than cover its costs. On IMDb it holds a 7.3 rating from roughly 14,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.8 from a much smaller number of voters, suggesting a more limited following there. A critics' rating of 7.6 from 29 reviews places professional assessments somewhat above the audience score on TMDB.