105 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Udo Kier plays a retired drag queen and hairdresser who slips out of his nursing home to style a dead woman’s hair one last time. Todd Stephens builds a small-town odyssey around a man the world already filed away. After fifty years in the margins of other people’s movies, Kier finally gets the close-up.
Pat Pitsenbarger is a retired hairdresser and former drag performer living out his days in a small-town Ohio nursing home. A lawyer arrives with a strange assignment. A wealthy estranged client named Rita Parker Sloan has died, and her will asks Pat to style her hair for the funeral. Pat walks out of the home and across Sandusky to do the job. The errand becomes a tour of the gay world he built and outlived. Swan Song is about a man measuring the distance between who he was and who the town still remembers.
Udo Kier plays Pat as a faded grande dame who knows exactly how he wants to be seen. He carries himself with theatrical precision even as his body slows. Kier lets vanity and grief live in the same gesture, and he makes Pat’s cruelty and tenderness inseparable. Jennifer Coolidge plays Dee Dee Dale, the former protege who stole his clients and built a salon empire on his style. Their confrontation gives the film its sharpest exchange. Linda Evans plays Rita Parker Sloan, the dead woman whose request sets the journey in motion, and Michael Urie plays Dustin, a younger gay man who treats Pat as both relic and legend.
Todd Stephens writes and directs, and he sets the film in his hometown of Sandusky at the pace of a man walking. The structure is episodic. Pat stops at a bar, a salon, and a cemetery, and each location pulls another piece of his past into the present. Stephens keeps the camera close on Kier’s face and trusts it to carry long stretches without dialogue. The film favors held shots and quiet over montage, which lets small reactions land. The approach risks sentimentality and mostly avoids it because Kier refuses to soften Pat into a mascot.
Swan Song works best as a showcase for an actor the movies have used for decades and rarely centered. Udo Kier has spent a long career playing villains and curiosities in other people’s films. Here he gets the lead and the last word. The script around him is thinner than the performance, and the emotional beats arrive on schedule. What lingers is the image of a forgotten man insisting on one more chance to do the thing he was great at.