Riposte To Nostalgia: A Love Song
A Love Song is all I require from a movie. It’s all I need a movie to be. It’s quiet, sad, sweet and brief, focusing mostly on just two actors in open, outdoor spaces: a burnt out but hopeful woman and a distant but kind man. The unspoken feelings and regrets between them are what power this 80-minute debut from Max Walker-Silverman. I’m tempted to say the movie is the kind of thing that doesn’t get made anymore - a story about the mature inner lives of older people, who look like everyday people and not just stars without makeup, presenting something old-fashioned and nostalgic. But it’s a film that refuses to resemble some chestnut from a bygone era. It exists in the present and I have some thoughts on the reason for this.
Faye (Dale Dickey) resides in an old camper in a Colorado state park. Each day, she catches and cooks langoustine from the lake outside her door, listens to old country songs on her radio, and reads the same two nature guidebooks. She is waiting for a man to arrive. She hasn’t seen him in decades and is not even sure what he looks like. She waits on mail from him, delivered by a young man acting as a postman with a satchel slung over the back of a burro. If we get a second shot with someone in our later years, are these still the authentic feelings we originally felt, or just the lingering sense of the excitement from the moment? Do our needs and tastes as aged adults really change all that much?
These questions, about the effect of time on our feelings and desires, are explored in quiet, observational scenes in which Faye is waiting for someone, about whom we know almost nothing, and for whom we sense a complicated set of feelings. We’re thinking it’s a man she loved, or who loved her, or wanted to have her but couldn’t. A substantial portion of the power of this mature film comes from inferring the nature of their relationship to each other by the way their gestures and glances imply worlds by what they won’t allow themselves to say, have lost the will to feel and can no longer understand.
The meaning or meaninglessness of the passage of time plays out across other elements of the story. A group of young cowhands in ten gallon hats led by a precocious teen who does their talking for them request that Faye to move her camper so they can dig up the body of a loved one they laid to rest there and move it to a more picturesque spot in accordance with her wishes. Faye refuses. She’s expecting a visitor and needs the camper to be in that exact spot, she explains. So they respectfully wait. There’s no rush. The body isn’t going anywhere. The dead have no use for time.
There’s also the matter of the couple camping nearby. Jan (Michelle Wilson) tells Faye that she can’t seem to work up the nerve to ask Marie (Benja K. Thomas), her lover of many years, to marry her, despite having sprung for this prolonged camping trip that afforded them some peace and privacy. Faye warns her that the clock is ticking, as her own situation has brought the preciousness of the passage of time into clearer relief. Life is too short to wait for the right moment to tell someone you love them in that life-changing way.
By the looks of Faye’s camper and the transistor radio playing her favorite old country tunes, you might think this story is set in the past. But the presence of this same-sex black couple as Faye’s neighbors feels like a sharp statement from Walker-Silverman. This is a film set in the present day, when more socially progressive relationship dynamics are complicated and fraught with emotional self-protection. A Love Song is not some chestnut nostalgia for the matinee weepies of old Hollywood. It presents itself as a movie for now without overstating. It’s not something for old people. Anyone with working senses should be able to appreciate this film.
When Lito (Wes Studi) finally arrives, we see there’s an entire history between the two of them that they can’t or won’t acknowledge. He’s pleasant and sweet, a bit mysterious - looking to need only his dog for companionship. He also seems cautious. We see that music played a big part in their younger lives as it does in the movie. Well-chosen songs feature on the soundtrack, like “About Her Eyes” by Jerry Jeff Walker, who passed away in 2020, and Michael Hurley’s “Be Nice to Me,” believably covered by the two leads in a natural and beautiful scene.
A lot of time has passed and they’re not the people they once were. It’s so refreshing to see older people in movies acting their age. These are two people long past the stages of mad passion and awkward gestures, and yet their slow revealing of their vulnerabilities and the existence of their feelings - which includes the most emotionally charged serving of ice cream you’re likely to see in a movie - is profound and real.
Again, this is all movies have to do to win me over. Narrative gimmicks, clever special effects, witty dialogue, intricate setpieces, urgent social commentary, shocking twists, go-for-broke stunt work; I see these elements frequently in new releases. I might like or dislike the way they’re employed but I don’t require them in order to be moved, entertained or provoked to deep thought (which are not mutually exclusive reactions as conventional wisdom suggests).
In-theater movies have come to be regarded by much of the public as special occasion big events, a view that enhanced viewing formats like 3D, IMAX and 4DX, along their draconian upcharges have done little to discourage. The movies themselves have conformed in scale to this view to such a degree that A Love Song doesn’t strike people as something worth leaving the house to go see. And yet, I would argue it’s because of the rareness of an item like this that it’s precisely something worth leaving the house to go see.
Lastly, I noticed something about myself while watching A Love Song with respect to performance.
In movies, I tend to respond with more emotion to older and more seasoned actors than actors who are closer to my age and this may have something to do with the change of trends in acting styles over successive generations. Younger actors tend to be more guarded, grudging or even coy with what they reveal for the camera. Glamorous younger stars in particular tend to get cast in projects - like blockbusters that are mostly targeted (still after all this time) for teenage and pre-teen boys and slow burn character dramas that call upon them to display no emotions, save for the brief designated moments when a screenplay requires it.
This may have something to do with the increasing tendency of these generations to view open, direct and spontaneous displays of emotion as weakness or simplicity of character. Perhaps social media and the DIY online content creation industry - the performances of our lives from behind screens - aid in this artificializing or suppression of our natural emotional states as individuals.
Older actors seem to perform in films without concern or awareness of this need to code their feelings in behavioral traits or hide behind stone faces while expressing as little as possible. There is an honesty about actors with less to prove that I find more welcoming. My response to the work of, say, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Qhan in Everything Everywhere All At Once or Rita Moreno in the remake of West Side Story may have to do with their emotional accessibility, or maybe my inability to hide my emotions in my own life, despite the difference in age. Their expressions of joy, sadness, fear, anticipation, regret, empathy, love and shame are unencumbered by the political baggage of the national discourse and its neurosis du jour.
Despite the long resumes of these veteran actors, which include dozens of TV and film credits, Dale Dickey and Wes Studi look like the kind of people you see hanging out in blue-collar taverns, VFW’s, and bingo halls all across America. The details of their faces tell their entire stories. The absence of any traditional movie glamour about them in this project is what makes them approachable and accessible, as well as beautiful and human.
Compare this with the relative inexpressiveness (or what I perceive to be such) of Robert Pattinson in The Batman, Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal or Jessie Buckley in Men and it would seem there is a direct link between age and the willingness of an actor to choose roles that let them openly emote on screen. While my identification with older, more open screen figures at times makes me feel like an old man with antiquated tastes, I can’t help but feel this observation begs the question about what is happening to acting or, considering the increasingly performative nature of public life among younger people, what acting is doing to happening.
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