Mark Reviews Movies: A LOVE SONG

A Love Song, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 28, 2022

Her face is like a map of experience—sorrow and grief, yes, but also the happiness and love that eventually lead to those hurts. The woman is named Faye, and in A Love Song, she has come to a campsite somewhere in Colorado, where a lake filled with lobsters and crabs sits at the center of the site, while an imposing peak—the tallest in the state, according to the locals, which is saying something—stands as a focal point in the backdrop. Faye has her trusty pickup truck and equally reliable camper, and she's staying here for the foreseeable future, waiting for someone or something or something connected to that particular someone.

Waiting is a good portion of writer/director Max Walker-Silverman's debut feature, which gives us plenty of time to watch Faye in the silences of the routines and the even quieter moments of doing nothing much at all—simply sitting and contemplating what has happened in her life and whatever or whomever she is anticipating. Faye is played by Dale Dickey, a character actor who, like so many of her thespian kind, is typically cast in supporting parts in independent films, television shows, and a few Hollywood movies. Here, she's given a leading role that might not seem too complex or complicated.

This is, after all, simply the story of a woman camping, waiting, catching food and eating, waiting some more, resting or listening to music or encountering a couple strangers, and just going on with the waiting, until the waiting ends. That character and the actor merely exist in this laid-back situation. While the narrative becomes more once Faye no longer has to wait, the build-up and payoff to that moment, as well as what follows, are dependent upon how completely Dickey exists as this character, who's herself existing in a kind of in-between state of the bittersweet past and an uncertain future.

It's not a glamorous role, to be sure—neither in terms of the big sort of moments that an actor might relish nor when it comes to general appearances, since Faye is living off the land and with meager means. There's no vanity or excess to Faye. She dresses plainly and for utility. She works with her hands, and her face, unadorned and natural, clearly has seen a lot. The lines there are as long as the years and as deep as a life filled with laughter and mourning. Dickey owns all of it. In that confidence of existing as she and this character are, most of the work in giving us a full sense of and a reason to intrinsically sympathize with Faye is already accomplished.

The rest of it comes from Walker-Silverman's story, which is minimal but sincere in reflective approach. Basically, Faye this camping excursion is the first time she has taken any kind of trip since the death of her husband seven years prior. This isn't some elaborate vacation, either, as Faye's limited means make clear, while some other details—such as her growing up in this area and the drive taking only about a day from her home—make that even more apparent. These are little steps in her grieving process (She still sleeps on one side of the bed in the camper, leaving an empty pillow as a kind of memorial). We come to learn that she might be considering a bigger one.

Until then, she waits on something, namely a letter, and someone who has promised to meet her at this campsite. We watch her daily routine, as the days pass without any certain notion of a specific timespan or date (Faye just picks one at random on a calendar and labels it "Today," so there's no telling how long she has been waiting). That gives us a sense of how self-reliant she is, while Dickey's naturalistic performance is imbued with the weight of grief, uncertainty, and rising disappointment as her visitor fails to show.

There are some enjoyable touches of oddity to help pass the time for her and us, such as a visit from a quintet of siblings (The youngest and only girl, played by Marty Grace Dennis, speaks for her older brothers), whose father is buried at the campsite and who want to move the body because a new oil derrick has spoiled the view, and an apparently magical radio, which Faye insists will play the right song for any moment. A neighboring couple, named Jan (Michelle Wilson) and Marie (Benja K. Thomas), invite Faye to dinner at their trailer and tell the story of how they're on a getaway so that Jan can propose—if she ever works up the courage to do so.

Anyway, it goes on like this, and we learn that Faye is waiting on a man, an old friend named Lito (Wes Studi, another character actor with naturalistic instincts as refined as his co-star). When he does arrive, they talk, and through that easy conversation about good and bad old times, Walker-Silverman simply allows the actors to exist in the specific quality of two people who knew each other long ago—and somehow still know each other just as well now—catching up, commiserating in grief, reminiscing, and subtly testing what might be on the other's mind about meeting up after all this time.

Walker-Silverman has a fine command of the tone here, which has underpinnings of mourning and longing even when it's playful or mildly absurd. The filmmaker's biggest strength in A Love Song, though, is that he gives so much of the purpose and meaning of the film to his two leads—and especially to Dickey. While it's just a story about living through a series of moments, Dickey is always and thoughtfully living in them.

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