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.