(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month
ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do
the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not
think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)
“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson
of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with
Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own
movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared
the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that
interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet
Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the
hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good
woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt
psychiatrist.
It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more
interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the
wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson,
gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry.
The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way
until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before
settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.
Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice
given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile
skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents
the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into
the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves.
Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way
that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and
sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really
counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now. Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed
entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew”
while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the
other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which
may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply
not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This
reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That
would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate
character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving
and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things.
Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one
day as he shops for a new car. The movie
hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation.
Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is
particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story
progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by
his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into
this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?
I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the
past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of
them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old
Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This
role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory
work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily
could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in
her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian
got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write
for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a
beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety,
morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I
would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and
now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I
think she should get an Oscar nomination for it.
Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial
debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many
good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently
he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He
was right.
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