


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.
#Song by song rating movie#
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.
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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. 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. 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 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.Īs 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. 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 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. 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.
