Dale Dickey is both blessed and cursed with a face that seems to betray her past in every crag and swoop. In this way, it's as if she doesn't have to work to convey the struggle of her characters, just stand in the light and let the lines of her face do the heavy lifting. For this reason, she has often been cast as the hard-scrabble matron of rough times in films like "Leave No Trace, " "Hell or High Water" and "Winter's Bone." She has been a virtual stand-in for the pitiless ravages of age and devastation.
In Max Walker-Silverman's bittersweet "A Love Song," however, she finally gets to play a different sort of long-suffering character, a deeply lonely widow, hoping above hope that an old romantic foil from her youth might restore her back to the land of the living.
Faye is a taciturn sort (in fact, we only learn her name about 50 minutes in the film), staying at a remote campsite on a western Colorado lake, waiting hopefully to meet with her old high-school friend/crush Lito (Wes Studi), himself a widower, who has agreed to meet with her, near where the two of them grew up many decades before.
As shy and quiet as Faye is, Lito has a very different energy, positive and more effusive. Both come from a place of profound tragedy and loneliness, but Lito seems more connected to the world outside, even if his life has taken a hard left turn.
It slowly becomes clear that Faye is putting a lot of pent-up emotion and yearning into this meeting, a chance, she thinks, to not have to spend the rest of her life lonely and alone (and it doesn't get more emblematic of that sort of life to see her at this somewhat forlorn campsite, living out of a cramped camper, and eating nothing but boiled crawdads she fishes out of the lake).
It's the kind of setup that could easily lead to smarmy emotional breakthroughs, or, worse, a kind of forced Hollywood-style resolution. Fortunately, Walker-Silverman isn't after easy or pat answers, such that the meeting, when it finally does happen, has elements of all sorts of things, including joy and guilt, nostalgia and pain -- the chemistry between Dickey and Studi always palpable and subtly moving.
The film ends on a well-earned note of melancholy, but remarkably keeps from being a straight downer. We may feel Faye's grief, but we also get a sense of her inner strength, the means we have as humans to keep on keeping on despite the dispiriting lives we may end up having to lead.
‘A Love Song’
88Cast: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, Michelle Wilson, Benja K. Thomas, John Way, Marty Grace Dennis
Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Rating: PG
Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Playing theatrically
The bereft Lito (Wes Studi) serenades his high school friend Faye (Dale Dickey) in the heartfelt but grown-up “A Love Song.”