"Swan Song"--Movie Theatre Review

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From the interviews with the star Udo Kier and the PR surrounding the film I really didn't know what to expect but certainly not what I saw! I was surprised reading that UdoKier had been in over 200 movies, some including big hits. Being a big movie fan his name and his pictures didn't ring a bell with me at all. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/prolific-character-actor-udo-kier-184638372.html From a couple of stories I knew the film was based on a true person https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/112306572/boyce-c-pitsenbarger who lived most of his life in Sandusky, Ohio, as a gay man from 1943 through the 2000s. Seeing the trailer https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/112306572/boyce-c-pitsenbarger I got the sense from the scenes shown it would be a campy, fun film showing what it meant growing up in a small town in Ohio as a gay person. I walked out of "Swan Song" playing in Fort Lauderdale at The Gateway Theatre realizing that I had cried a lot more than I laughed watching the film. Udo Kier does give a star turn in both the 'gay' scenes and the scenes with his lover of 33 years, the scenes in the nursing home, the funny scenes in the drag bar/show, his scenes with his old friend "Eunice", played by Ira Hawkins, which are funny and touching, as are the brief AIDS scenes, the scenes with, as a hairdresser, he is asked to do the hair of the recent deceased society lady Rita Parker Sloan with who he had a odd relationship with but was offered $25,000 to do the job. The opening is slow and doesn't really tell you where the story might go and how the director-screenwriter, Todd Stephens, is trying to reach the audience until we leave the nursing home when the movie picks up, hits on many of the subjects I have mentioned including a perfect scene between Kier and Stephanie McVay, the latter having been a customer of Pat's at his beauty shop. The only scenes that I feel didn't completely work were the ones involving Jennifer Coolidge while the ones with Michael Urie added a much needed look at the gay life of today as compared to 'yesterday'. "Swan Song" is not what you may be expecting but it is a film that would have made Pat Pitsenbarger proud of who and what he was and will make you feel what gay life was like in Ohio in the 20th century.