Pauline Kael Review

This bare-bones "art" movie is about the healing of Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), a legendary country-and-Western singer who has become an alcoholic wreck. The film is said to be honest and about real people, and it affects some viewers very powerfully; audiences are unusually still "almost reverent" as the born-again Mac is baptized at the church of the Vietnam widow (Tess Harper) whose frontier-woman steadfastness has made his redemption possible. The Australian director, Bruce Beresford, making his American début with this inspirational film, has shot it in bright sunshine out in the middle of nowhere; the widow's motel-gas station is as isolated as the mansion in GIANT. (It's a mystery how she could ever make a living from it.) Mostly the picture consists of silences; long shots of the bleak, flat land, showing the horizon line (it gives the film integrity); and Duvall's determination to make you see that he's keeping his emotions to himself; and Tess Harper staring out of her cornflower-blue headlights. (These two have matching deep-sunk eyes.) The theme song - which Duvall sings in a dry, unmusical voice - is called "It Hurts to Face Reality." Written by Horton Foote, master of arid realism, the script recalls the alleged Golden Age of Television. With the fine young actress Ellen Barkin, whose few scenes as Mac's daughter by an earlier marriage are the film's high points, and Betty Buckley, who stirs things up a bit as the brassy, country-star earlier wife, and also Wilford Brimley. Produced by Foote and Duvall; Foote won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Duvall won for Best Actor. Universal.

For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.

Sources taken from Microsoft Cinemania '95

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Last updated on July 1, 1996.