"I rode all over town tonight. Started twice for San Antone; turned around, came back. Started for Austin, started for Dallas. Turned 'round, came back." Tender Mercies drives up in an old pickup, so covered in dust that it's impossible to tell its make. It gets out at the far end of the dusty driveway, then ambles up to the porch and tips its dusty ten-gallon hat. If you listen closely, you can hear it murmur "ma'am" in greeting. Then it saunters back down the dusty driveway, gets in its truck, and drives away. Five minutes later, you won't be able to pick it out of a lineup. It was nominated for Best Picture in 1983, and I can't understand why.

Robert Duvall, who won Best Actor for his performance, plays Mac Sledge, a washed-up drunk who, in another life, was a popular country singer. He ends up stranded at an East Texas gas station-cum-motel, where he asks the young owner Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) for a job. He stays on, cleans up, asks her to marry him, and generally gets his life back together. But his past comes calling: the members of an incredibly polite band come on a pilgrimage to see him, and maybe get him to sing for them. He learns that his ex-wife (Betty Buckley), whom he attempted to kill in a drunken rage, is singing at an Opry nearby. He tries, and eventually succeeds, to meet his estranged daughter (Ellen Barkin), who then turns to him for help when she elopes with a member of her mama's band. Throughout, he interacts with his stepson Sonny (Allan Hubbard, who never acted again), whose father was killed in Vietnam.

It works, for a while at least, as a quiet observation of the rhythms of everyday life—the kind of gently rocking rhythms that lull one into sleep. The entire film is a a respectful, even reverential, homage to small-town reticence; when Mac shyly asks Rosa Lee if she might could consider being his wife, and she says she'd consider it, it's the emotional equivalent of a bomb going off. But everything is so toned-down that it's toneless. As the only cast member who raised her voice in any way—in song, in anger—Betty Buckley sticks out of the cast like a mariachi band marching through town; I found myself drawn to her as the only person who experienced or could share any emotion with me. The rest of the characters exist without being judged: they simply are, and the film doesn't care to voice an opinion on their silence.

Its relentless vistas of the middle west, courtesy of cinematographer Russell Boyd aren't the ecstatic quietness of Days of Heaven but the anonymity of a roadside snapshot, minus the world's biggest ball of twine; by the end, I was wishing for that ball of twine. As the film wandered toward its end—no, that's not right: as it sat there in its rocking chair and the end approached in that broken-down pickup, I found myself filled with disquieting wishes for something to happen to break the silence. I'd have accepted European-style nihilism, maybe a tractor-trailer bouncing over Sonny's body interrupting the endless triviality of the last scene, just so I'd leave the film with the sense that something, anything had happened. And yet it was nominated for five Oscars and won two, voted in, perhaps, by peope who misunderstood its inertia. I don't require explosions and layered plots; I appreciate a small, personal film. But what I do require is the sense that there's something going on beneath the surface, which Tender Mercies lacked.

—November 28, 2006