‘A Love Song’ Review: Dale Dickey Glows in This Tiny, Tender Sundance Discovery

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe same day faded-romance drama “A Love Song” screened for the Sundance Film Festival, I caught an interview with Marilyn Bergman on NPR in which the late lyricist described the time director Richard Brooks came to her and partner Alan with a request: “I want you to write me a song that is to appear twice in [“The Happy Ending”].

Early in the film, I want it to function perhaps as a proposal of marriage between these two young lovers,” he said to them. “l don’t want you to change a note or a word, but I want the song to mean something very different when you hear it a second time,” Brooks told the couple, who answered the assignment with the ballad “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” There’s a love song in “A Love Song” that functions in much the same way.

It goes unheard until the very last scene, but in a way, it echoes all that has come before — the longing, the regret, the feelings two lovers couldn’t put into words.

The tune is a contemporary one, but it sounds like a classic, as if it’s been waiting in the radio for this very moment, paying off an intimate conversation from earlier in the film, when a widow named Faye (Dale Dickey) sat with an old friend from childhood, Lito (Wes Studi), and said, “Give that dial a swirl.