Love comeback

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Movie
German title Love comeback
Original title Tender Mercies
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1983
length 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Bruce Beresford
script Horton Foote
production Philip Hobel
music George Dreyfus
camera Russell Boyd
cut William M. Anderson
occupation

Tender Mercies is a American film drama directed by Bruce Beresford from the year 1983 .

action

Alcoholic and former country star Mac Sledge crashed in the motel owned by widow Rosa Lee and her son Sonny. He sees the damage he's done and wants to pay it. But because he has no work, he asks her for some so that he has a roof over his head and a warm meal. He renounces alcohol himself and comes closer to Rosa Lee, who is barely older than his daughter.

Mac is later harassed by a reporter who wants to know how he crashed and whether he is planning a comeback. He doesn't answer the reporter, but through the article the Slater Mill Boys , a budding country band, notice him and politely ask him to start as their lead singer. However, he refuses, because he has finished with the music for himself and no longer misses it.

Mac wants to see a concert of his ex-wife Dixie and can't stand her songs about their past together. Nevertheless, he asks her to see their daughter Sue Anne, which she forbids him. Angry about it, he almost starts drinking again, but then decides to race away in his pickup truck. Since he doesn't drive home, but disappears for hours, Rosa Lee worries whether she might lose her second love after her first great love, her husband who died in the Vietnam War .

But Mac appears at night, proud that he has managed not to fall into alcohol. He feels good and is only briefly upset when Rosa Lee tells him that she passed one of his songs on to the Slater Mill Boys . When they are successful in front of an audience and ask him again to sing with them, he promises to give it some serious thought.

Mac received a surprise visit from his daughter Sue Anne, who fled from her mother. She asks him about his bad past. He admits his alcoholism and does not deny her claim that he tried to kill her mother while intoxicated. After he has confessed all of his sins, he is then baptized in Rosa's church , happily begins composing songs and after a long time plays again in front of an audience with the Slater Mill Boys .

In Mac's absence, his daughter appears at Rosa Lee's and asks her for financial help: Since she is now eighteen, she has left her mother to start a new life with her husband, who is also an alcoholic. It doesn't come to that, however, because soon after Mac hits the heavy news that Sue Anne was killed in a car accident caused by her husband. Mac meets the desperate Dixie. Back at Rosa Lee's home, he devotes himself to gardening in silence and finally, when Rosa Lee appears, lets his pain run free while she listens in silence.

The final scene suggests that Mac is now finding comfort and happiness with his new family around Rosa Lee and Sonny.

criticism

“This is a small, beautiful, and a little cluttered film about small town life, loneliness, country music, marriage, divorce and parental love: and it deals with all of these things equally. Still, you pay a small, low price for the simplicity and clarity with which all of these topics are presented. There is simply no precise dramatic plot. "

- Janet Maslin : The New York Times

“An old-fashioned family drama that is predictable in its construction and whose good actors cannot make up for the extreme emphasis on dialogue. Vague in the character drawings, flat in the photographic advertising film aesthetic. "

- Lexicon of international film

Awards

literature

  • Roy M. Anker: The Wings of a Dove: The Search for Home in Tender Mercies . In: Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies . William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company , Grand Rapids, Michigan 2004, ISBN 0802827950 .
  • Rebecca Luttrell Briley: The Tender Mercies of Independent Film Making . In: You Can Go Home Again: The Focus on Family in the Works of Horton Foote . Peter Lang, New York City 1993, ISBN 0820420042 .
  • Anthony Holden : Behind The Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards , 1st. Edition, Simon & Schuster , New York City 1993, ISBN 0671701290 .
  • Robert Jewett: Saint Paul at the Movies: The Apostle's Dialogue with American Culture . Westminster John Knox Press, 1993, ISBN 0664254829 .
  • Richard Leonard: Movies That Matter: Reading Film Through the Lens of Faith . Loyola Press, 2006, ISBN 0829422013 .
  • Leonard Maltin : Cathleen Anderson, Luke Sader (Eds.): Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide , 2004. Edition, Plume, New York City 2003, ISBN 0451209400 .
  • Danny Peary : Alternate Oscars: One Critic's Defiant Choices for Best Picture, Actor, and Actress From 1927 to the Present . Dell Publishing, New York City 1993, ISBN 0385303327 .
  • Judith Slawson: Robert Duvall: Hollywood Maverick . St. Martin's Press, New York City 1985, ISBN 0312687087 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Janet Maslin : Tender Mercies (1983) on nytimes.com, March 4, 1983, accessed January 19, 2012
  2. ↑ The comeback of love. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used