A Love Song

It's a 7 but it gets a bonus point for just being so damned sweet. The writing is dear. The direction tender without becoming syrupy. The acting is heartfelt perfection.

Elders reunite with all the same adolescent awkwardness of their youth. Time may have weathered bodies but their hearts are fresh as spring.

She says, "Come inside." So we get to go, go inside lives lived. Hearts beating. People gently reconnecting.

It's playful and tender and quiet and touching and beautiful in ways I did not expect.

I love a good story well-told. This is a good slice of life story told so well it captures the exquisite joy and sorrow, expectation and disappointment, truth and beauty, of life.

Two people in their twilight years, both now widowed, meet up to see if their childhood attraction remains strong enough to lead somewhere all these decades later.

The setting is austere, and the few other characters in the film have hinted-at stories of their own.

Very low key, but nicely acted and with a strong sense of place.

A woman has parked her travel trailer in a Colorado park, waiting for a childhood friend to meet her there. The woman proceeds to meet a collection of odd residents/workders but no childhood friend for quiet a while. The film started out as a kind of Waiting for Godot setup, but it became a study in loneliness of people whose past lives seem to be disappearing. The film reminded me of Nomadland with its haunting loneliness and hopelessness of its characters, but A Love Song took a different turn and avoided the hopelessness. Still, the two main actors (Dale Dickey and Wes Studi) are recognizable from their innumerable background acting roles in past features and come across and relatable and true characters--i.e. Real human beings. This quiet indie film offered a lot of subtle thought-provoking ideas, particularly to people like me who are entering our 60's and 70's. It was a sweet film.

This is a melancholy, impressionistic movie about aging, loss, and the mystery of solitude. While the story line is simple and thin, the handful of characters who inhabit it convey the ambiguity and uneasiness of real life so naturalistically that it almost feels like a documentary. Not all viewers will be interested in experiencing this level of lonely introspection set amid the stark barrenness of the American west, waiting for "something to happen." But another type of viewer will find the relative wildness of the setting calming, reminding us of our own actual journeys and mental escapes into the almost incomprehensibly large landscape of this part of the country--a place where you can be both undisturbed and nearly forgotten. And in this movie the landscape itself seems to be an inquisitor, stripping bare civilized pretensions and routines with the oppressive gravity of solitude and unlimited time. Aside from being drawn with laughably impossible mechanical skills, the lead female character comes across as both frighteningly realistic and distinctly unappealing. Though she shows positive traits like self-sufficiency, curiosity, and generosity, she also seems uncomfortable in her own skin--making the viewer squirm and wonder if she's always been this way or whether grief and advancing age have made her so tense and enigmatic. The pacing and feel of the thing is so sober and bare-bones that it's surprising to find a touch of Wes Anderson in some of the incidental characters who momentarily break the silence.

This movie was utterly beautiful in every way. I did not know that I needed to witness strength and vulnerability in silence and was tremendously moved by Dale Dickey's honest and transparent performance. I can now count two times that I have been in awe inspired by an actor's performance when motionless and silent: (1) was watching Anthony Hopkins's heart break in Remains of the Day, and now (2) Dale Dickey letting go of a romantic fantasy and confront a deeper level of grief in A Love Song. My sincerely thanks to everyone on this production. It's been three days since I've seen it, and the impact of the movie is still felt acutely. Bless you and your humanity.