Love Song for Bobby Long

Purslane Hominy Will was her mother Lorraine’s golden child, so she was named after a yellow flower (a weed, actually) and corn. But this golden child has no memory of her mother, a New Orleans jazz singer junkie. When Pursy, an 18 year-old high school dropout, finds out her mother has died, she returns to New Orleans (from a life of watching TV in a trailer while eating peanut butter dipped in M&Ms) to find two men living in her mother’s ramshackle house. They spend the day being drunk while Lawson supposedly writes his novel and Bobby, a former English professor, supposedly mentors him. These two lie to her, telling her that Lorraine left the house to the three of them. In fact, she gave Bobby and Lawson a year to live there, but the house belongs to Pursy.

It seems like everyone in the neighborhood knew Lorraine. Everyone loved her. All of the men admit (with a mixture of embarrassment and pride) that they were “close� to Lorraine. But Pursy has no memories of her. She is rootless. She has come home to a home that is not hers. She finds family that is not hers. She keeps hearing history that isn’t hers. But slowly she begins to find that all these things become hers.

Love Song for Bobby Long wants to be a literary film. After all, it is about writing. So books play an important role. Bobby and Lawson play a game of “name that quote.� The three of them are constantly reading (and very good writers like Flannery O’Conner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Carson McCullers). In contrast to this, Lawson is writing very bad prose, which just ends up in the trash (or decorating the Christmas tree). While the film wants to be literary, it doesn’t trust its audience to be smart enough to get it, so in one scene, Lawson has to blurt out what’s going on in case the audience doesn’t understand.

The film does a wonderful job of using visuals, especially of the New Orleans neighborhood. But it is so rich in visuals that they become distracting. There are so many things that are so prominent in the framing of shots that we expect them to have some meaning in the story, but they don’t. I went back to see this film a second time to pay attention to some of these scenes, and still, there was nothing there.

I’m picking at this film because it does have significant value. It shows us a community of people who may seem to be lowlifes, but they are among themselves a caring community. It’s not just the proximity of the neighborhood that makes them community; it is almost as though the connection to Lorraine is what holds them all together. Since Pursy doesn’t have memories of her mother, she seems at times like an outsider. But because she is Lorraine’s daughter, she also has a place in the community.

The story shows us the power of community to transform lives. The coming together of Bobby, Lawson, and Pursy (and some side characters as well) creates something greater than the sum of the parts. These people bring about changes in one another that make them each a better person, but more importantly, that binds them to one another.

In spite of the shortcomings, which also include a fairly predictable story line, there is still much to cherish in this film. It is in some ways like the characters in the story. It has real flaws, but it also has the potential to bring new life.