A Love Song

A Love Song

This “Love Song,” the first film by Max Walker-Silverman, does not have CGI (or even a big musical score to let you know when something important is happening), but it still takes place in America. Or rather, an America where nothing goes wrong; people live together and take their time about things. It’s set in Colorado, at a dry campground that looks like it’s not often used a life of few means and simple pleasures that turns out to be thoroughly bittersweet with time.

Faye (played by Dale Dickey) is seen from behind for the first several minutes. She comes out of her small trailer hitched to a pickup truck, walks over to a lake and picks up a basketful of crawfish. She turns on an old transistor radio, Longines Symphonette logo intact, and twists the dial until something usually well-curated and American emerges. Dickey has one of those hard faces that tells you she’s had some tough years.

Faye spends her day patiently waiting for someone or something. She opens a calendar, closes her eyes and hovers above it with a magic marker; when she puts it down on a date she writes “Today” in its square.

After a while, a little girl with about three-fourths of cowboys stops by and asks Faye if she can move her trailer. Seems that their family’s patriarch is buried somewhere around here (or so they’ve been told), and they’d like to dig him up again to re-bury him somewhere without such direct views of an oil rig recently erected as the only visible blot on this whole landscape. Faye says politely that she’s expecting another visitor who’s coming right here; the group accepts this and cheerily moves along.

Faye also accepts dinner from Benja K. Thomas and Michelle Wilson as couple who have Faye over at their nearby campsite; they tell her the story of their engagement, which has been proposed and re-proposed two or three national parks ago on this road trip. She looks at them and we see her take envy back into herself.

Lito (played by Wes Studi) shows up, on “Today.” He’s as talkative as Faye, i.e., not at all. Their warm but terse conversations tell us bits about their past together she’s recently widowed; they go way back, grade-school adventures though it remains unclear whether they were ever lovers. This rendezvous seems to have been made with a tacit understanding that the possibility might be investigated.

They fall into an almost immediately comfortable exchange, largely through music. Faye explains her radio to Lito: You can twist the dial wherever you want to land on, it’ll be playing the perfect song right then. Lito teaches Faye Michael Hurley’s “Be Kind to Me” on his electric guitar, and later scenes show the two of them living out that song with each other and Lito’s quiet friendly dog.

And that’s pretty much it. “A Love Song” is a pleasant film to watch. It has good cinematography, subtle editing, many beautiful images and two actors who are experts at restrained performances. One of its last lines is “We’re going to be okay,” and the movie appears to think that might be possible if we can manage to live lives as simple as Lito and Faye’s. I don’t know if I believe that anymore. If I had, maybe I would have been more touched by this entirely nice movie.

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