Review // Love & Mercy

For many of us the Beach Boys were just that goofy band that Dad put on and tried to convince us was cool. Personally, songs like Barbara Ann and Surfin’ U.S.A. never really had the impact Dad was hoping for (though I put on a good face). In fact, the harmonized male voices and candy floss lyrics seemed to a teenage me downright…nerdy. That all changed however with the first listen to Pet Sounds. Like the very best albums in rock and roll history, every track on Pet Sounds introduces you to sounds and melodies that you’ve never heard before (sometimes literally, why are their dogs barking at a train?). Infused with an intangible feeling of melancholy and nostalgia the songs seem to drift through your speakers from some other world. That other world is the mind of Brian Wilson, and while director Bill Pohlad spends much of his new film Love & Mercy attempting to plumb the depths of this world, the true delight is just sitting back and listening to the music.

Brian Wilson remains one of rock and roll history’s most ambiguous figures. Through his work with The Beach Boys (made up of Wilson brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl, as well as cousin Mike Love and Al Jardine), he became a critically acclaimed studio producer while still in his twenties (he tells band members he “plays the studio”) before largely disappearing for decades. This gulf of time looms over Pohlad’s film, so much so that the director made the unconventional choice of splitting the part of Wilson between two actors. Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) portrays Wilson’s younger 1960’s self, while John Cusack (High Fidelity) portrays him on the other side of the mysterious gulf, in a strange land known as the 1980s.

Dano’s half of the film picks up with The Beach Boys already enjoying more success than most bands ever see, touring regularly and doing their best to “stay ahead” of The Beatles. However, after a panic attack on a plane, Wilson decides not to travel with the band on their tour of Japan. Instead, he remains in California with his emotionally-manipulative father, assembling a studio filled with professional musicians and building an album far different than anything the Beach Boys had done before. As the album progresses so does Wilson’s anxiety, soon reducing him to a stuttering mess only able to find peace in the recording studio and unable to escape the increasingly present voices in his head.

When we meet Wilson again in the 1980s he’s a different man…literally. Shuffling into a Cadillac dealership, he speaks to saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) in a voice barely above a whisper, apologizing for tracking sand into a car he plans to buy. Wilson is now under the treatment of Paul Giamatti’s controlling, self-aggrandizing Dr. Eugene Landy (best known for his record of 60s counter-culture slang The Underground Dictionary). Landy insists that Wilson is a “very sick man” and keeps him on a drug regime that would make Keith Richards cringe. However Melinda’s appearance sparks Wilson’s former passion and soon she is fighting to wrest him free of Landy, even against Wilson’s own protestations. It’s a distinctly different story than Dano’s, focusing more upon Banks’ character than Cusack’s, and yet the halves work together in the type of strange, unorthodox harmony that would have caught Wilson’s ear in the studio.

It’s clear Love & Mercy is a labour of…well, love for director Bill Pohlad – after all it’s not like the producer behind films like Twelve Years A Slave and Wild needs the money – but it’s a pleasant surprise that with a story that could easily have been given the cookie-cutter rock bio treatment, Pohlad has opted for a unique and interesting format. Transitioning between the two most eventful periods in Wilson’s life, and leaving the rest largely ambiguous (we get occasional allusions to the Wilson brothers’ abusive childhood but little else) allows for a slower-paced, more thoughtful examination of the artist than you see in most biographical films.

This plumbing of the literal depths of Wilson’s life is occasionally represented in none-too-subtle sequences such as cameras traveling through ear canals or sending a white-robed Wilson to the bottom of his pool. However whatever stylistic misteps Pohlad makes he also shows a real directorial flare. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the studio sequences as Dano’s Wilson works to create his “pocket symphony to god” Good Vibrations. Piano chords turn to icy strings and a sawing cello suddenly changes to dreamy harmony as the film snap-cuts around the studio, focusing on the boards as Wilson builds the house. It’s a gutsy choice when you have such a catalogue of songs at your disposal, to take them apart and show audiences only pieces, but it works – providing a deeper appreciation for music that has grown so familiar we’ve stopped listening.

Dano is really the only actor you notice in the film’s 60s portion, and he does a nice job of showing us the slow breakdown of Wilson’s mental state as he fights to create an original sound. Dano takes advantage of the meaty role, and keeps Wilson sympathetic, even as he’s making his studio musicians wear fire hats or screaming at dinner party guests for making too much noise with their utensils. Cusack does a fine job with the less showy role, portraying a Wilson more apt to curl up in a ball than direct a studio filled with musicians. Elizabeth Banks is the true stand out of the film’s 80s portion, and her natural portrayal of Ledbetter is made all the more impressive when she has to keep her composure alongside Paul Giamatti’s scenery-devouring Landy.

Though the film spends much of it’s time focused on the troubled mind of Brian Wilson, it’s his music that shines through in the end. While Pohlad should be commended for the film’s bold format, it also serves to remind us why the traditional biopic format is so regularly returned to. Like when a legendary musician takes the stage, most audience members are going to want to hear the hits. Love & Mercy provides them, but you’ve got to feel them too.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.