Mark Reviews Movies: THE SONG OF SWAY LAKE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2018

The narrative of The Song of Sway Lake moves back and forth in time, with little to differentiate between the two eras. One period is after World War II, as a young, well-to-do couple establishes a life, in part, near a spacious, two-story cabin on a lake that has been named after the husband's family. The other time is 1992, as the grandson of that couple returns to the lake, now preparing to become a tourist destination, to find a rare record that belonged to his late father.

We know when the movie goes backwards in time, because of narration, a certain nostalgic tint to the cinematography, and the repeated imagery of the young, happy couple, skinny dipping with carefree ease in the lake. We don't learn much about them, except that they were deeply in love. The details have been lost to time, memory, and death.

The wife is still alive, but she doesn't speak much about her late husband, although she still speaks to him. He left her letters and possibly recordings of his voice, telling her of his feelings for her and just a little about the war. His war stories have been lost, too. His journals, the only remnant of these tales, are written in a code that's indecipherable to the casual reader.

Such are the ways of life, relationships, and the truth of whom a person is and what a person has experienced. Co-writer/director Ari Gold taps into that sense of fleeting time and unattainable truth, as a son grieves for a father, a wife and mother mourns her husband and son, and everybody is too caught up in his or her own memories and putting on a visage that hides his or her true self to really understand another person.

Gold is more interested in the mood of this place and the nostalgia of its inhabitants than the specifics of these characters and telling a story in the present. The real story is in its mysteries—how people hide themselves from the world, how we miss the things that really matter about other people, how certain events send us crawling through the past to look for answers that can no longer be found. It's an ambitious attempt to illuminate the lives and mindsets of these characters by way of intentional obfuscation. The movie is as much about what we don't and can't know about these people as it is about what we do learn about them. In a broad sense, it's a compelling way to tell a story, but in keeping us at a certain distance from its characters, the movie never connects on an emotional level.

The son/grandson is Ollie (Rory Culkin), whose father committed suicide six months prior by jumping into the freezing water of Sway Lake, named after this family. Ollie has one goal: to find a rare recording of a song inspired by Sway Lake, performed and recorded at the grandparents' wedding reception.

It's worth a substantial amount of money, but Ollie has no intentions of selling it. He wants to keep it, because it was special to his father. The father never even opened the record, assuming that it was among the greatest songs—if not the greatest song—ever recorded.

Along for the trip is Ollie's friend Nikolai (Robert Sheehan), a Russian immigrant who also lost both of his parents (Ollie's mother left the family). Of particular interest to Ollie is Isadora (Isabelle McNally), a local of the lake who catches his eye with her purple hair.

Ollie's grandmother Charlie (Mary Beth Peil) makes an unexpected return to the cabin, looking to put some things in order before selling the place. Since she could use the extra money, part of her mission is to find the record, too, enlisting the aid of her housekeeper Marlena (the late Elizabeth Peña) to search for it among the vast collections of music throughout the house.

Pretty much every character here longs for a time or life that they either once had or can only imagine. Charlie is lost in the memories of her past happiness with her late husband (Brian Dennehy provides the voice-over for that character). Nikolai is looking for a sense of belonging, putting on a confident air to hide his insecurity and stealing various things from around the house. Ollie finds a secret space where his father kept his private collection of recordings and assorted letters, clippings, and notebooks. The son discovers a letter he wrote to his dad and finds a photo of his father as a boy—his despondent look being ignored by the smiling faces of his parents in the foreground.

Amidst these mental trips to the past are less involving stories within the present (Ollie trying to court Isadora's attention/affection, Nikolai offering his buddy advice and pulling pranks on the local, Charlie debating about the lake's future). They're necessary, perhaps, as a way for Gold and co-writer Elizabeth Bull to have some semblance of a plot, but they often feel like a distraction from the real core of this story, which is mostly about how the present fades to past to be forgotten as time passes. The Song of Sway Lake communicates this esoteric idea with surprising skill, but like its characters, the movie loses track of the substance of the here and now in the process.

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