A washed-up country singer wakes up broke at a Texas roadside motel after a binge, and the widow who runs it, raising her son alone, lets him work off the bill.

TENDER MERCIES (1983) stars Robert Duvall as Mac Sledge, a once-famous singer-songwriter whose career collapsed into alcoholism and obscurity. Tess Harper, in her film debut, plays Rosa Lee, the young widow who gives him work on one condition, that he not drink while he does it, and slowly gives him a reason to stop drinking altogether.

Horton Foote wrote the screenplay, and his plain, unhurried dialogue carries the film more than any plot turn does. Bruce Beresford, an Australian director working in rural Texas, shoots the flat land and small churches without sentimentality, letting Duvall’s performance do the work.

Duvall did his own singing, wrote two of the songs, and won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Foote also won, for his screenplay. Betty Buckley plays Dixie Scott, Mac’s ex-wife, now a country star still singing his songs, with Wilford Brimley as Harry, her manager. Ellen Barkin appears early in her career as Mac’s estranged daughter.