Set on a rural Colorado campground and charting the idle life of Faye (Dale Dickey), a sixtysomething woman living off the grid and waiting for the arrival of an unknown person, writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song plays like a tamped-down version of Nomadland. But rather than integrating social commentary on late capitalism and what it means to live life at a remove from middle-class stability as in Chloé Zhao’s film, Walker-Silverman focuses on the minutiae of solitude, observing Faye as she reads books on birding, goes fishing, and looks out onto the horizon from her trailer home.
These activities are punctuated by a smattering of visitors, which include a largely silent group of men, accompanied by a young girl, looking to exhume the remains of their dead father, plus a pair of women who keep Faye company one evening. But it’s finally the arrival of Lito (Wes Studi) that puts the film’s wheels into motion, as it becomes clear that he’s either an ex-lover or a potential future lover who can bring greater meaning to Faye’s life.
As the title indicates, the love angle becomes the narrative’s focus, but it’s altogether unconvincing as anything other than an admittedly welcome excuse to let Dickey and Studi share a lovely series of scenes together that slowly reveal and define the nature of their characters’ relationship. There are broader, indirect suggestions made by Walker-Silverman’s screenplay that gesture toward insights about the nature of solitude and believing that, no matter one’s stage in life, things can be reformed in significant ways. But there aren’t suitably dramatic circumstances or sequences that draw this out in any specific manner beyond the obvious connection that the pair shares as they sit talking or stargazing.
When characters speak, they don’t so much reveal poetic or poignant details about their lives as they do mundane observations about living in rural places. At one point, one character explains how her grandmother “ate an ice cream cone and watched a cowboy movie every night” and lived to be 101. These sorts of quaint details suggest a potentially richer portrait of the value of rural life in American culture than A Love Song ultimately knows how to paint, as it relies on wide shots of the distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the United States in the present day.
The dynamics of the film’s core relationship are reminiscent of The Bridges of Madison County in how Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep’s middle-aged lovers grapple with the depth of their feelings for one another. But whereas Eastwood’s film embeds its narrative within the greater context of how generational legacy affects those in the present, A Love Song remains frustratingly insular and mostly confined to the emotions of its main characters.
The only question that comes to matter in the film is whether Faye and Lito will remain together or not, and Walker-Silverman approaches the answer with an underwhelming sense of urgency and perception. The circumstances play weightier than their dramatization, and the film’s PG-rated sensibilities are such that matters of sex, desire, and nature are never interrogated as they pertain to these older adults, with Walker-Silverman opting to have them play guitar together and look tenderly into one another’s eyes. While Dickey and Studi are a compelling on-screen pair, they would have benefited from a script with more on his mind.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
