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BILL GOODYKOONTZ
Movies

'A Love Song' is a quiet study of a life with a stunning backdrop and great actors

Bill Goodykoontz
Arizona Republic

There are many reasons to see “A Love Song,” writer and director Max Walker-Silverman’s debut feature, but two outshine all the rest: Dale Dickey and Wes Studi.

They’re two of the greatest character actors working and have been for a long time, and it’s a low-key delight to see them carry a film.

In reality it’s Dickey, so great in supporting roles in so many films and shows (“Winter’s Bone,” “Justified,” even “Iron Man 3”), who carries the film. She’s in almost every scene as a woman waiting, living out the moments of each day in repetition.

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Faye, Dickey's character, resides in a trailer hitched to her truck in a campsite in Colorado. She catches crawdads every day, boils them on her gas stove and eats them on a card table out front. She has a battery-powered radio, an old one with a tuning dial that she twists to randomly capture whatever song the dial lands on. Somehow it always plays just the song she needs, she says later, even if she doesn’t realize it at the time.

That’s about as close to magical realism as the film gets. It’s a stripped-down movie, as stripped down as Faye’s trailer where she goes about her daily routine. But it’s also a patient one, which may translate to some audiences as slow or boring.

It’s definitely the former, but never the latter.

Faye is interrupted on occasion, like by the couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) who invite her for dinner. They’re at a neighboring site, working their way through national parks and toward a marriage invitation that hasn’t gotten around to happening yet.

Wes Studi and Dale Dickey in a scene from "A Love Song."

Faye also chats with the mailman (John Way), whose letters are carried by mule. Nothing today, ma’am. Maybe tomorrow.

Then there is the family of cowhands who buried their father beneath her trailer some time ago, and wonder if she might move to another camp site so they can dig him up and move him?

No, Faye explains, she can’t. Someone may be expecting to find her here.

That someone is Lito (Studi).

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This film isn't bound by the idea of traditional romance or happy endings

They were childhood friends, long ago. We learn in bits and pieces — only a few pieces, not the whole puzzle — that one of them might have wanted to kiss the other (they debate who initiated it), but life took them in different directions.

Now both have lost their spouses. If they could meet again, what would come of it? When Lito finally arrives, along with his dog and his guitar, we find out.

There is an understated beauty to their interactions — shyness giving way to a tentative familiarity (Faye wasn’t even sure what Lito looked like before he arrived) that plays nicely against the more grandly depicted beauty of the rural scenery around them. They play guitars together and harmonize, eat ice cream.

What do you do, Lito asks, surveying the spartan existence? “There’s days and there’s nights, and I got a book for each,” she explains — a bird-watching book for daytime, a book of constellations for night. (Faye reflexively names aloud whatever bird she hears outside.)

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Walker-Silverman, to his credit, is not beholden to the idea of traditional happy endings, which is not to give anything away. It’s merely a description of how he lets his film play out, as naturally as the performances of his leads, who never seem to be acting. Instead they are exploring, whether it’s their surroundings or each other.

“A Love Song” is, no doubt, a small movie (it only lasts 81 minutes), a miniature study of a life. But it is an oddly compelling one. And Dickey and Studi masterfully make the difficult look easy.

'A Love Song' 4 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Max Walker-Silverman.

Cast: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, John Way.

Rating: PG for mild thematic elements.

Note: In theaters Aug. 19.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.

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