The cement block walls immediately identify the setting as a nursing home. Relatively comfortable as such places go, Patrick’s room includes a dresser, a TV and a reclining chair where disconcerting dreams disturb his naps. “Good afternoon residents. Lunch will be served in five minutes. Our special of the day? Fruit cocktail,” a voice of shallow cheer announces over the loudspeakers.
Patrick (Udo Kier) dons his shapeless grey track suit, and shoes fastened with Velcro straps, and pads down the institutional hallway. Seized by a waggish impulse, he hops an empty wheelchair and zips to the cafeteria. Patrick looks distant from the old folks and doesn’t join in their sad, banal chitchat. He exudes the aura of having been someone.
And indeed, he was someone—the flamboyantly gay hairdresser to the well-heeled of Sandusky, OH. He replies with haughty silence when the attorney of the town’s richest woman, just deceased, informs him that her will provides a handsome salary if he does her hair and makeup for her funeral. “Rita wants to make things right,” the attorney insists. Patrick and Rita had a falling out and he remains bitter. They were friends. He feels betrayed.
Swan Song is the latest by Todd Stephens, the director who emerged with his coming-of-age, coming out film, The Edge of Seventeen (1998). As in previous outings, Stephens places Swan Song in Sandusky, the slightly run down, run-of-the-mill Midwest town he calls home. Reconsidering his initial rejection of the attorney’s offer (but unable to contact him), Patrick slips out of the nursing home in his shapeless grey track suit and stumbles down the road to the funeral parlor where Rita is being fitted for a coffin.
Following a mild stroke and financial calamity, Patrick has been confined to the nursing home for many years. At times, Swan Song becomes a Rip Van Winkel comedy of a man who returns to a changed world. The gay bars are gone, replaced by “gastro micro brew pubs” (the terminology appalls him, as it should anyone). He encounters old friends and old enemies and strangers whose random but well-meant kind words can mean the world to the old and lonely. As the odyssey continues, he sheds the grey track suit for a lime green pants suit, a silken scarf and a snappy hat. The personality he repressed reemerges.
Swan Song works as well as it does because of the veteran German actor in the lead role. Udo Kier’s nuanced performance relies on body posture, facial expression and the light in his eyes more than words. The dialogue is refreshingly sparse throughout.
