Bruce Beresford and Horton Foote tell the story of a drunk country singer’s second chance in an hour and a half of wind, silence and small kindnesses. Robert Duvall barely raises his voice and we believed every minute; the scenes away from the motel are less sure.
Mac Sledge is a drunk when we meet him, and for some time the film does not tell us he was ever anything else. He wakes on the floor of a motel room somewhere on the Texas flatland, his drinking partner gone, and asks the woman who owns the place whether he can work off the bill. Rosa Lee says yes, provided he does not drink on her property. He does not. Bruce Beresford and the writer Horton Foote take an hour and a half over what happens next, and almost none of it would count as an event in another film. That is why it works.
Foote leaves out the scenes another writer would have built the film around. Mac proposes in one sentence, in the vegetable patch, while Rosa Lee is bent over the beans; she asks if he means it; the next time we see them they are married. Nobody gets a speech about what they have lost. When the past turns up, in the shape of a reporter (Paul Gleason) who has worked out who the man at the petrol pumps used to be, Mac stands still and asks him to leave.
Robert Duvall plays all of it at a murmur. He gives Mac a stoop, a way of hooking his thumbs in his pockets, and a voice that sounds as if it has been left out in the weather. He does his own singing, and it is a plain baritone that would have filled a dance hall once and now fills a kitchen. The scene that got at us comes when his daughter Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), whom he has not seen since she was small, asks whether he remembers a hymn he used to sing to her. He says no. She leaves. He sits down and sings it alone, to the window, and Beresford holds the shot. We were not ready for it, and we stopped the film for a minute afterwards.
Tess Harper does not play Rosa Lee as a saint. She has a boy to raise, Sonny (Allan Hubbard), and a business to keep, and she takes Mac on the way she might take on a hand for the summer. Hubbard is the kind of child actor who does not appear to know he is one. The scene the three of them share in the truck after a baptism, Sonny asking whether he feels any different and Mac allowing that he does not, not yet, is one of the best scenes about faith we know, because nobody in it claims anything.
Russell Boyd shoots the motel as one low building in a great deal of sky and keeps the camera far enough back that the people are small in it. The wind is on the soundtrack most of the time. Indoors he uses what comes through the window and lets faces go half-dark. William M. Anderson ends scenes a beat before we expect, so the film keeps moving even when nobody on screen is. George Dreyfus’s score is a few bars of strings between scenes; the music that matters is the country songs, and the film lets them carry it. Jane Greenwood puts Mac in work shirts washed to nothing and Dixie in sequins.
Dixie is where the film is least sure. Betty Buckley plays Mac’s ex-wife, now the star he used to be, at a stage volume nobody else in the cast approaches, and her scenes with Wilford Brimley, as her manager Harry, seem to belong to a louder film. The young band who come asking for songs are picked up and set down without much consequence. And the film is so even in temper that when the hard thing happens, late on, and we will not say what, it is dealt with in the same tone as everything before it. We think that is right, and we understand anyone who finds it too composed.
Beresford came to this from Breaker Morant, which has a courtroom in it and a great deal of talking, and Foote had written the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird two decades before. Neither had made anything this quiet, and of everything either has done, this is the one we would keep.
Watch it on an evening when you do not want to be shouted at. It runs 92 minutes, and the wind does most of the talking.
