Love and Mercy may be a sufficient introduction to those unfamiliar with Brian Wilson, the musical leader of the boyband-turned-rock-legends the Beach Boys. His crucial contribution to the pop culture of the sixties evolved into the seminal centerpiece of the movement’s entire history, unfairly overshadowed by the likes of the Beatles and other monumental releases of his time. He needs to be known.
So many underestimate the story that goes along with Wilson, his hopes, his fears, and his dreams that all came at a crossroads in his life before his mental breakdown beginning in the mid-sixties. I can’t help but think that Love and Mercy fell into this very trap that they were trying to solve in sharing Wilson’s life.
The script, written together by Michael Alan Lerner and Oren Moverman, combines dual components of Wilson’s life to make an alternating plot, a younger version (played by Paul Dano) at the height of the Beach Boys’ popularity and an aged version (played by John Cusack) around the 1980’s, reminiscent of his golden years. The film toggles between these separate timelines, following Dano as he further isolates himself in the recording studio during the thick of his deteriorating mental state and Cusack as he forms a relationship with his eventual second wife Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks). It’s meant to be a story of the broken Wilson of the future recuperating from his internal struggles with the help of his loving partner and breaking free from the grasp of his psychotherapist Eugene Landy, played here by Paul Giamatti (Landy prescribed Wilson absurd quantities of drugs unfit for his client’s diet, arguably pushing him further into his illness).
But are the two timelines complementary of each other? Is the link here strong enough to make a thorough illustration, let alone hold by itself? Dano and Cusack each seem to be playing their own musician (how can you have chemistry when you’re not in the same scenes?). Perhaps the contrast was intentional, Dano’s shy intellectual trying to hold on to fleeting hope opposite from Cusack’s gradual redemption raising him from below (Dano’s performance is a little stronger in that sense). There’s detachment, though, making everything in between seem underdeveloped.
I will need to state that my main problem in watching this film, and possibly the bias I have against it, is that I’ve made it seem for myself like any effort to capture Brian Wilson onscreen is a shell-like cut.
Having listened to the masterful Pet Sounds of 1966, the Beach Boys’ project (mostly a solo work from Wilson) the movie exhibits in its making, I could never see the portrayed Wilson as a weak man in need of saving. The real-life Brian understanding of the human being, intricate and holistic, took him to the point where he could write a collection of songs that all shared a common theme, the first concept album. It was brilliant, not because of the musical mastery, but because of the way the music could be felt just as much as it could be listened to.
In short, the defining characterization of Brian Wilson has been already made. By him. It’s Pet Sounds.
The movie, instead of tapping into the deep reserve of material that Pet Sounds could have provided, barely scrapes Wilson’s vision and looks through a vague lense. It tries to express Wilson’s genius in a vague, incomprehensible way (once in a 2001: A Space Odyssey trip-out that was yet another scene that didn’t work for me, oddly dull and conventional in this context) when you could say the very reason he actually suffered was his frustration with his inability to outpace his pop music contenders and pull the world’s yet untouched heartstrings with truly emotional art. The film just melds the struggle and his genius into one indistinct design, unsatisfyingly.
But if that’s what the movie really wants to do, what is it that the characters keep glowingly referring to as Wilson “going back to himself again” when all they’ve argued is that his mind’s enormity has caved in and left him shattered? The film doesn’t even use a complete formula. Mopiness, pity, and overblown rage are the only prominent feelings our main actors, all of whom have had strong work in the past, convey, and none of them solidify into a single person among them. It’s a very inconsistent reflection of the Wilson we learn to love immediately in the first few notes of "Wouldn’t It Be Nice," the opening song to Pet Sounds.
Sure, there were some parts I hated as a movie by itself. A scene where Dano’s younger Brian Wilson playing a “God Only Knows” in-the-making to impress his routinely skeptical father looks as if it were trying to cram genius into a sappy music video. Cusack’s older Wilson jumping off a yacht into the water below with Banks to swim to the nearby shore? Horrible, horrible, horrible. These moments that the movie tries to make for us aren’t there, and somebody tried hard to make this a biography that looked like a biography. And we see right through it.
But the problem isn’t what this movie says wrong, it’s that it says less than it should. By the end, I thought, “So what?” As prolific as Love and Mercy molds Wilson to be, it seems to be a film about being prolific rather than what it really meant for him.
Bill Pohland, who directed this, will make better films. There’s a lot of promise in the individual shots that make up Love and Mercy, and the right person is in the right shot on the whole. It would feel a whole lot better if the movie knew what to do after the set-up. I want to say more, but it seems like the whole, unlike Pet Sounds, is worth less than the sum of its parts.
