Max Walker-Silverman’s rustic, warmhearted debut film, A Love Song, opens with several shots of lone wildflowers surviving in the dry, bare terrain of a Colorado campgrounds. Harshness and beauty are intertwined in these images—a dichotomy that reverberates throughout the rest of the film, most immediately when the film’s world-weary protagonist, Faye (Dale Dickey), steps out of her trailer and the majestic lake and mountains surrounding her are revealed. Dickey has long been one of the most dependable character actors in Hollywood, and A Love Song, which gives her a long overdue stab at a lead role, knows just how to highlight her talents, often honing in on her remarkably expressive, weathered face, allowing minute gestures to speak both to the lingering pain of losing her husband and her recently awakened hope for the future.
The film’s opening 15 minutes find Faye alone at her campsite going about her daily routine of catching crawfish, birdwatching and gazing at the stars. It appears she’s living completely off-the-grid, suggesting perhaps that we’re in for a rehash of other mournful women-in-the-wilderness films like Nomadland or Wild. But when the park’s postman, Sam (John Way), arrives with no letters for Faye, we learn she’s there to meet an old high-school flame, Lito (Wes Studi), who has even more recently been widowed. In this stretch, Dickey communicates, without barely uttering a word, a deep vulnerability and sense of unease and longing as Faye waits, not knowing if her potential beau will actually show up—until, finally, he does.
A two-hander for most of its final hour, A Love Song is at its best when it’s at its most subtle, observational and low-key. Shots of Lito fixing his hair for a few beats too long before knocking on Faye’s trailer or of Faye getting her composure before saying hello as she comes up behind him speak volumes about the mix of inelegance and eagerness that dominates the duo’s behavior as they try to make a good impression on one another. A later scene where the two have beer and ice cream together and slowly begin to let their guards down elicits an aching tenderness that is far from cloying, managing to address both characters’ still festering wounds without harping on them or mining them for cheap sentimentality.
Ostensibly, not much happens in A Love Song, but this stripped-down approach to narrative allows for a heightened focus on the damaged emotional states of Faye and Lito, who struggle to see if this forced connection can flourish into something grander. Unfortunately, because of the minimalist approach, the intrusiveness of a few stilted and unnecessary scenes with a young cowgirl and her four brothers, as well as a brief appearance of a lesbian couple, is all the more glaring. Where the former feel like cut scenes from a second-rate Wes Anderson knock-off, the latter feel steeped in the kind of American indie clichés of which the rest of the film nimbly steers clear.
Even so, these scenes only temporarily disrupt the spell cast by Dickey and Studi’s raw yet beautifully understated performances. A Love Song’s ambitions may be small in scale, but its lived-in qualities are, for the most part, rendered with a gracefulness and assuredness that’s uncommon in first feature films. That it also avoids the treacle ending one might expect from a film that debuted at Sundance only further cements Walker-Silverman as a talent to watch out for. And if it leads to Dickey getting more lead roles, that’s all the better.
Photo courtesy of Bleecker Streete
The post A Love Song appeared first on Spectrum Culture.