There is a plot to Tender Mercies, the Best Picture Academy Award Winner for 1983, but upon my most viewing I experienced it more as a tone poem, as a mood of America in the 70s and 80s, as a meditation on the pace and silences of a time before ubiquitous media, as a contemplation of the emotions of lost and retrieved lives. Or perhaps more simply as a sort of long form enactment of a quiet country song.

Any antiquer watching Tender Mercies will have a field day, especially with the kitchen scenes. There is the kitchen table with the chrome border and legs. There are the metal chairs with vinyl upholstery. There is the heavy fridge with its latching door handle. On the wall near the stove there hangs one of those ubiquitous, two-shelved wooden spice racks, which came prepacked with the spices, many of which would crust up in their bottles, never emerging to season a dish. Did anyone use their dried cilantro back in the day?

I only spent 1980-81 in the United States (and returned for good in 1987) and that was in Illinois far from Texas, but still so much in this movie was so familiar: the aforementioned items in the kitchen, the TV and couch, the Ford Maverick (which was our car) parked in front of a bar, and even the Trans Am that Mac Sledge’s daughter drives, which perhaps was the acme of ambition in our depressed, working class town. I was called to supper many a time from our wood-paneled living room, turning off a TV on which we actually had to change channels with a pair of pliers to have dinner at a kitchen table very like Rosa Lee’s.

In addition to the physical things, I was very familiar with the mood and ethos of the places in the movie, barring the bars and honkytonks, of course, which as grandchildren of a Baptist grandma, we weren’t like to experience. I did experience Baptist church, though, very much as it was depicted with its gowned choirs and the baptismal built into the wall behind the stage. You can tell a lot about the theology of a church by its architecture and fitments.

Even more integral to the mood and ethos of the film, though, were the silences that permeated it and in which the characters lived their lives. Yes, sometimes there was a radio on in a vehicle or in the house, but sometimes gardening or folding laundry or a worry-filled waiting just occurred in silence, with the distraction of music or television eschewed. In one scene, the click of a radio being turned off punctuates its gravity.

The camera in Tender Mercies, too, is never in a hurry either, to switch camera angles or move in for a closeup. The wide shots emphasize the space and silence of Texas. Some scenes simply consist of a static shot of two people in quiet conversation or of a song being picked out on a guitar.

As mentioned earlier the plot of the movie moves along in an episodic fashion, with spans of time implied and key events simply assumed. Rosa Lee tells Mac’s daughter that his journey to sobriety did involve some lapses which are never shown. We never see Rosa Lee and Mac’s wedding or know where it took place. As with a good country song, though, we are given vignettes that tell the story. And this story has themes that are taken straight from the great American country and western songbook: hell raising and repentance; an alcoholic reformed; the love of a good woman; elopement and disappointment; untimely death and heartbreak.

As with the truly great country songs, Tender Mercies paints a picture, creates a mood, and lets that mood do its work without the need to wrap everything up in an upbeat conclusion. What it portrays even more fully than a country song can, though, are the unsung stories between the verses and choruses: the brittle sadness of a wounded woman, the questions of a child kept from her father, the silent inability of a man to engage with his past. Just mind your heart when Mac quietly sings “On the Wings of a Snow White Dove” at the window of an empty living room in one of those long, static shots  Whew.

The final scene of Tender Mercies does portend a stolid sort of happiness for Mac and Rosa Lee and Sonny, but the scene immediately preceding it is simply a list of painful questions for God which hang in the air with no answers.

Reader Response Theory. I am a firm believer that readers of a book or viewers of a movie should try to attempt to understand the meaning that its creator intended, that a creator should, indeed, intend some meaning (otherwise why try to communicate at all). However, it is also true that we interact with films and texts very much based on the experiences that we bring to them.