The
record collector’s passion is all well and good, as long as they remember it is
all about the music and not the object in and of itself. Many times, I have
cracked open highly collectible LPs that were still sealed and never regretted
it. Ollie Sway should know better too, but he will get caught up in the Sway
family legend surrounding a one-of-a-kind never-been-play private pressing in
Ari Gold’s The Song of Sway Lake (trailer here), which premiered
last night at the 2017 Los Angeles Film Festival.
Sway
Lake was once the exclusive vacation community of the privileged Northeast
elite, including Ollie’s robber baron great-grandfather, who used to own the
entire lake bearing his name. His grandmother Charlotte, a.k.a. Charlie, still
largely thinks of it as her private reserve as well. For years, she summered
there with her beloved war hero husband Hal. In fact, their lake home was
immortalized in “The Song of Sway Lake,” a massive wartime hit for the
Andrews-esque Eden Sisters. However, the composer Tweed McKay (reportedly a
former lover of Cole Porter) privately recorded the original, hipper big band
version as a personal gift for Hal and Charlie.
The
couple never listened to the special 78, because they understood it would
eventually be worth a pretty penny. Consequently, Charlie is quite annoyed to
find it is now apparently missing. Presumably, Ollie’s record collecting father
hid it somewhere for safe-keeping before his recent suicide. Both she and Ollie
have come to Sway Lake hoping to find it, but Ollie will be distracted from the
search by Isadora, an actual live girl working as a maid across the lake, who
will talk to him, most times. Grandma Sway will also get sidetracked by Ollie’s
Russian chum Nikolai, who goes out of his way to act like the grandson she
always wanted.
Sway Lake has a terrific
backstory, but it is overstuffed with intergenerational melodrama. Arguably, all
the distractions crowd-out the father-grieving son storyline, which should be
central to the story. Frankly, all of Nikolai’s Tom Ripley-like shenanigans
should have been red-penciled-out during an early stage of the script
development.
Nevertheless,
Gold capitalizes on some highly evocative, era-appropriate music composed by
his brother Ethan. The climatic version of the title song, featuring John Grant
singing the vocals of Tweed McKay is particularly spot-on.
Nobody
could possibly be more loserish than Rory Culkin’s Ollie. He is such miserable
sad sack, it is hard to believe Isabelle McNally’s reasonably normal Isadora would
give him the time of day. On the other hand, Mary Beth Peil clearly enjoys
playing Charlie Sway as the drama queen she is cracked up to be. The late
Elizabeth Peña really helps keep it all grounded as Charlie’s tough,
down-to-earth cook-slash-companion, whereas there is just too much of Robert
Sheehan doing Nikolai.
