‘A Love Song’ Review: Max Walker-Silverman’s Debut Is A Beautiful, Overdue Showcase For Dale Dickey [Sundance]

Yellow wildflowers in the dusty brown dirt, multi-colored rolling hills, and a green-blue lake set the stage for writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’s debut feature film “A Love Song.” A rumination on love found and lost, it’s also a hymn to the beauty and wonder of Walker-Silverman’s native Colorado. Cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo shoots the film with the hazy, yet hyper-defined colors of an old picture postcard. Rarely has the cobalt blue of the night sky, vast fields of sagebrush, or the white trunks and yellow leaves of the aspen trees been so lovingly photographed. 

It’s in this bucolic place we find retired Forest Service flier Faye (Dale Dickey, in a rare lead role) camping in Campsite #7, waiting for an old sweetheart she hasn’t seen in fifty years. The number seven is important to her. There’s luck in it, she says. Later when we learn she hasn’t had her picture taken in seven years, it’s revealed that’s how long it’s been since her husband has passed. But while the film is laced with melancholy, like any good love song it’s also a bit of a fable. 

READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival

In Faye’s old-school yellow floral wallpapered camper, her only objects are books about the birds and the stars—one for day and one for night. And a silver portable radio that always seems to play just the right song for the moment “even if you’re not sure why.” And she’s right. Swirling the dial, the analog device always seems to conjure nostalgia-tinged, vaguely classic mid-century country songs that feel like the soundtrack of a half-remembered dream. 

While she awaits her sweetheart, she’s visited by a myriad of whimsical fellow campers including four cowboys and their little sister clad in classic western dress shirts who want to dig up their father buried under her campsite, a couple of Black lesbians on what started as a long weekend that’s now turned into a weeks-long trip across America, and the bolo tie sporting mailman Sam who delivers letters using a packhorse. These are not so much real people as they are the kind of characters you’d find in a classic story song. This could easily be a leftover track from Bruce Springsteen’s concept album ‘Western Stars.’ This conceit doesn’t always work, especially in terms of race with the women Faye befriends.

Faye is, however, a great showcase for Dale Dickey, who has made a name as a hardened frontier woman in a number of films like “Winter’s Bone” and “Leave No Trace.” Here that hardened exterior is cracked. As she thinks about the impending visitor, she giggles, an impish smile across her face telling her new friends about this man she once knew. When he does arrive, she’s both shy like a schoolgirl, but also as forward as a woman with much experience in the world. 

Equally wonderful is Wes Studi (“Dances with Wolves,” “The Last of the Mohicans“) as her erstwhile sweetheart, Lito. The charismatic actor brings a stalwart grace to Lito, despite his early timidity when they first reconnect. Dickey and Studi are magnetic on-screen, oscillating between the easy chemistry of old friends, and the awkwardness of strangers. Studi’s Lito is full of internal conflicts, a man who misses his wife dearly and hasn’t yet learned how to be intimate with others again but still feels the pull of this other woman he once loved. 

The two reminisce about a trip taken to this very spot when they were in 10th grade, both remembering the same details, just slightly differently. Eventually, the conversation turns to their departed spouses, and it’s unclear if the yearning on Faye’s face is for the man in front of her or for the lost comfort of being loved. “Do you think you can love something that ain’t there anymore?” she asks, to which he earnestly replies, “I know you can.” 

A striking debut from a filmmaker as much in love with his home state as he is insightful about the lasting power of human connections, “A Love Song” is a film that feels purposefully encased in amber. It knows memories can be an alluring trap, and while it’s okay to indulge in nostalgia every once in a while, it’s best done in bursts no longer than the length of love song on the radio. [B+]

Read along with all our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival