Love and Mercy

It’s appropriate that in the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy one of the film’s most interesting elements is the use of sound. Wilson, of course, is the visionary genius behind the music of The Beach Boys, and his experiments with sound, recording, and producing techniques on albums like Pet Sounds are still influencing artists today. So in attempting to tell not one but two separate but related stories of Wilson’s life, director Bill Pohlad uses sophisticated sound design to create sonic montages that both evoke Brian Wilson’s genius and his madness.

 

Love and Mercy tells two stories side-by-side – first is that of 24 year old Brian Wilson in 1966 after he resigns from concert touring with The Beach Boys at the peak of their influence and success so he can stay home and “create new sounds” for the band. What he ends up doing is composing, producing, and recording most of what will eventually become Pet Sounds, one of the greatest American pop albums ever made.

The other story takes place in the 1980s as a wildly overmedicated middle aged Brian Wilson meets and falls in love with Melinda Ledbetter, a former model and Cadillac saleswoman, who then helps him escape the grasp of his Svengali-like doctor/business manager/life coach Eugene Landy.

So the first story shows how Brian fell into drug abuse and mental illness and the second story shows how he climbed out.

Throughout both stories, sound plays a major role – Wilson having cellists play the same buzzing back and forth notes for three hours trying to get it just right for “Good Vibrations,” sonic flashbacks of his father beating him as a teenager, static as the radio in Wilson’s head tunes in and out as he struggles through a drug  induced stupor. It gives viewers a sense of being inside Brian Wilson’s head – for better or worse. We get the thrill of his soaring creativity but also of the profound dysfunction that plagued his life for years. 

 Two actors play Wilson -Paul Dano as the young version and John Cusack as the older one. Dano is the better matched of the two, effectively mimicking the musician’s spacey, slack physicality. Cusack seems slightly miscast though. Even though he gives himself over to the frightened, childlike quality of the isolated, drugged-out Wilson as best he can, John Cusack is simply too cerebral of an actor to really pull it off. You’re always aware that it’s John Cusack playing Brian Wilson.

Paul Giamatti plays Eugene Landy and his performance is a little phoned in. He plays Landy with a familiar oily, frog-eyed intensity. It’s not a bad performance by any means, but there’s nothing that’s particularly distinct about it. 

 Besides Dano, the real stand out is Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter. Banks is underrated in general. She consistently plays characters who are smart, wickedly funny, and strong. As Ledbetter, you believe she has the force of character to help someone as damaged as Wilson out of his personal hell and back into real life. The climactic moment in which she wordlessly faces down Eugene Landy when he comes to confront her is thrilling. For a movie about sound, that moment of silence is surprisingly powerful.

As biopics go, this is a good one. Tight and focused rather than overstuffed and rambly, and aesthetically interesting without being pretentious. Appropriately enough, the film ends with footage of the real Brian Wilson performing the title song live in concert. It’s no “Good Vibrations” but the fact that the man is still alive and making beautiful sounds in the world is worth celebrating and worth making a movie about.   

The Lego Batman Movie

When 2014’s The Lego Movie came out, it was a charming, visually-inventive story about the importance of being creative and doing your own thing despite authority figures and corporations telling you to conform (which was ironic because it was a movie about Lego, the corporation that sells boxes of specifically designed bricks that are only meant to recreate the Millennium Falcon or the Titanic or the Chrysler Building. But that’s neither here nor there.) It was fun, bright, and clever – and one of the standout characters was the childishly macho Batman voiced by Will Arnett. Arnett’s Batman, while still a good guy, was essentially a man-child obsessed with his own coolness. His screamy heavy metal song about himself – with lyrics like “Total darkness!” and “No parents!” even played over the closing credits.

 

It was successful enough to spin Batman off into his own plastic brick iteration called, creatively enough, The Lego Batman Movie. While I absolutely don’t understand the phenomenon of  taking already established movies like the Harry Potter films and simply remaking them with blocky, little plastic people – that is, I don’t understand them beyond the naked, greedy cash grab for younger audiences that they are – The Lego Batman Movie isn’t one of those. Rather than recreating any of the half dozen other big screen adaptations or any specific storyline from the comics, this version liberally takes and lovingly spoofs material from all of them. 

 The film gets a lot of mileage out of the tortured loner routine, as Batman, still in his cowl while relaxing at home in stately Wayne Manor, eats lobster thermidor alone, plays  his electric guitar alone, and watches Jerry Maguire on DVD in Bruce Wayne’s giant home theater – alone. He’s just defeated practically every villain in his considerable rogue’s gallery, and then he returns to a giant echoey mansion on an island. Alone.

Commissioner Jim Gordon retires and his daughter, Barbara, takes over the police force. Rather than just flipping on the Bat Signal every time there’s a problem, Barbara wants police and citizens to work with Batman so that, as a team, they can make Gotham safer. Naturally, Batman hates “everything you just said just now.”

Of course, the film centers on getting Batman to grow up a little and see that teamwork and friends are better than doing everything yourself. It brings a much needed sense of lightheartedness and positivity to what has become a relentlessly grim and bleak character over the last thirty years. One of the pleasant surprises of the film is that is even acknowledges the Adam West tv version of the 60s, something that has been the embarrassing, unspoken secret of Batfans for years.

The greatest joy of the film is how visually inventive it is. Over the last hundred years, there have been movies made with puppets, Muppets, marionettes, animation, CGI, kids as adults, adults as kids, silent film, 3-D, 4-D, and in Chiller-Vision. But the advent of this combination of actual Legos with computer and hand-drawn animation is unique, and on a strictly visual level, it’s pure pleasure to watch.

The film is highly self-aware and makes meta-filmic jokes about itself throughout. That’s entertaining both for kids who just think it’s a silly romp and for adults who get the winking inside references peppered throughout. However, in the big picture, one can see this becoming the Lego brand – self-awareness and pop culture inside jokes ad astra ad nausem. There was a trailer for the Ninjago Lego movie beforehand and like the Lego Movie and Lego Batman, it’s another silly, jokey plastic brick epic about daddy issues for both those who have daddies and those who are daddies. So we’ll see if the success of Lego Batman proves to be a good thing or a bad thing going forward.

Its place in the larger Lego canon aside, The Lego Batman Movie is bright, funny, and really lovely to look at. Don’t be a lone wolf. Take your team and go see it. 

John Hurt

Over the last year or so, it’s felt like every other episode of Moviehouse could have been a memorial for one departed member of the filmmaking world or another. Maybe it’s just been a long string of bad timing, maybe it’s the baby boomer generation getting older, maybe the gods of filmmaking wanted a terrific softball team up in movie heaven. Whatever it is, it’s been kind of a heavy year and I had decided not to do another memorial show for a while. But then John Hurt dies, and there wasn’t any way I could let that go without some comment.  

  

You may know him as Garrick Olivander, the wandmaker who gives Harry Potter his first wand or perhaps you saw him in his Oscar nominated role as Max the imprisoned heroin addict in Midnight Express. He was the rebellious Winston Smith in the original dystopia, 1984, and he was a Hitler-like fascist leader in V for Vendetta over twenty years later.

Part of what makes John Hurt notable is his ubiquity. The guy was everywhere. He started in film in the early 1960s and worked steadily up until the time of his death in January from pancreatic cancer. Hurt was versatile, doing everything from Shakespeare to serving as the narrator for Winnie the Pooh cartoons. He easily crossed back and forth between giant blockbuster franchises like Indiana Jones and tiny independent movies no one ever saw, like his wonderful performance in 1997’s little-seen Love and Death on Long Island. 

But it’s not just that Hurt worked a lot. He was good. Really, really good. When he was a bad guy, he was forcefully evil. When he was the hero, he inspired a legitimate sympathy. He could do what great actors do – he made audiences feel. Perhaps the most distinct characteristic of his work was his voice. His accent could be cultured and aristocratic or guttural and cockney, but his voice itself always had the same quality of being simultaneously gravelly and yet smooth, youthful and yet wizened.

It’s worth noting for fans of the Alien franchise that it still going strong after nearly forty years that John Hurt played Kane, the executive officer of the ill-fated ship Nostromo, in the original 1979 film directed by Ridley Scott. Hurt’s character was the very first person in movie history to have an alien burst out of his chest in that unforgettably horrifying sequence. Hurt was nominated for a British Acting Film Award for short but indelible performance. 

My idiosyncratic personal favorite Hurt performance was in the supremely 80s legal dramedy, 1987’s From the Hip. Hurt plays Douglas Benoit, an impish but monstrously arrogant and possibly murderous university professor who hires an unorthodox lawyer played by Judd Nelson to get him off the hook for murdering a prostitute. Hurt was sly, charming, aloof, and also terrifyingly convincing as someone could possibly kill someone with a hammer.

Of course, everyone should see Hurt’s performance as John Merrick in David Lynch’s 1980 film, The Elephant Man. The whole film is a marvel of writing, cinematography, makeup, and performance, especially Hurt. In a film all about the humanity of someone who is treated so inhumanely, Hurt gave a performance of subtlety and authenticity. It could have been grandstanding or treacle, but instead was one of the great performances of all time. Director David Lynch’s claustrophobic, sometimes nightmarish production design and black and white cinematography showed a steaming, overcrowded Victorian England filled with monsters who looked human and Hurt’s John Merrick, a delicate, lovely human who looked like a monster. It’s a powerful film and it’s a fair bet, it’s not like anything else you’ve seen. 

Hurt was an actor's actor - versatile, hardworking, and from all reports, a really lovely guy to work with. He worked very, very hard over the six decades of his career, and though I am sad there will be no more John Hurt performances, he has more than earned his rest.