Bill Pohlad (2014)
The creative genius of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, was anxious from an early stage of the group’s career to work in a recording studio rather than perform to audiences. The director of Love and Mercy, Bill Pohlad, and the screenwriter, Oren Moverman, respect Wilson’s preferences. They quickly summarise the Beach Boys’ initial success – reconstructions of performances in live concert and on television, enough to give us our bearings – before concentrating on the protagonist’s private and unusually cloistered professional lives in the years that followed. The narrative switches between the mid- and late-1960s and twenty years later, by which time Wilson – after a long period of halting creative activity, drugs, alcohol and food addictions, and nervous breakdowns – was under the influence of a psychotherapist called Eugene Landy. This relationship began when Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn, enlisted Landy’s help. By the 1980s, according to Love and Mercy, he was not only dictating strategies for improving and maintaining his patient’s mental health; Landy was also Wilson’s de facto legal adviser and commercial manager. Oren Moverman’s screenplay is a reworking of a script by Michael Alan Lerner called ‘Heroes and Villains’. That Beach Boys’ song may have been rejected as the title for the eventual film, in favour of one of Wilson’s later compositions, but the moral distinction of the main characters reflected in the title of Lerner’s script certainly holds good in Love and Mercy.
Pohlad’s and Moverman’s juxtaposition of the youth and middle age of their hero’s life isn’t a novel idea. What is surprising is that the twenty-something and forty-something versions of Wilson are played by two different actors, Paul Dano and John Cusack respectively. (Once the central figure in a biopic has reached adulthood, you expect her or him to remain in the same body for the duration – however many decades the life lasts, however much aging make-up is required.) Perhaps this isn’t so unexpected in view of Oren Moverman’s track record: he co-wrote the screenplay for Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007). That film, however (although I don’t think much of it), has a thematic rationale for its multiple incarnations of Bob Dylan that hardly applies to Love and Mercy. Paul Dano, chubbier than he usually is, somewhat resembles the young Brian Wilson; John Cusack doesn’t look like the older Wilson, or like Dano. It’s clear from the start, even in the brief clips of the Beach Boys on stage, that Paul Dano has got Brian Wilson: he’s alert and expressive in ways I’ve not seen from this actor before. Dano is so engaging that at first you miss him whenever John Cusack is on screen instead but Cusack’s interpretation of Wilson gradually wins you over. Once his psychological problems start to take hold in the 1960s part of the story and you fully understand his circumstances in the 1980s, it makes a kind of sense that Brian Wilson is literally a different man. The question of whether there’s a spiritual continuity between two actors playing one person in the same film is always a particularly subjective judgment. I’m not sure I did sense this kind of link between Dano and Cusack but that didn’t seem to matter – the Dano Wilson and the Cusack Wilson feel like complementary characterisations. For example: Dano animates Wilson’s creativity, a quality that’s inevitably submerged in the man Cusack is playing; Dano has relatively little opportunity to dramatise Wilson’s emotional neediness – an opportunity that Cusack is given and which he takes.
There’s a third strong performance on the heroic side of the cast list – from Elizabeth Banks, as Melinda Ledbetter, the car salesperson who eventually became Brian Wilson’s second wife. (They first meet when Brian buys a Cadillac from the showroom where Melissa works.) The script presents Melinda as entirely admirable – loyal, loving, courageous in her resistance to Eugene Landy. Elizabeth Banks does well to suggest what it costs Melinda to achieve this. Banks is especially good at the nuances of smiling: Melinda’s sunny expression is a mask and a shield as often as it’s an expression of pleasure or joy. As the chief villain Landy, Paul Giamatti does a fine job. Landy’s tyrannical domination of Wilson is manifested in increasingly extreme and outrageous ways: the nasty wit that Giamatti brings to the role is always there – he also gives Landy a streak of growing desperation that strengthens the character. Bill Camp is less successful as Wilson’s father Murry, the Beach Boys’ manager until they dismissed him in 1964. In his important first scene – Brian, anxious to impress his father in spite of the rift between them, plays the evolving ‘God Only Knows’ on the piano and sings the lyric to Murry – I felt Camp needed to be either more remote or more deliberately hurtful in his response. He doesn’t get a level of hostility that gives Paul Dano what he needs to react to. It’s obviously not Camp’s fault that each of Murry’s subsequent appearances in the story is rather crudely conceived. The writing of the smallish roles of the other Beach Boys – neither heroes nor villains – isn’t inspired either, although Jason Abel is amusing when Mike Love complains, in humourless exasperation, that on Pet Sounds ‘even the happy songs sound sad’.
The studio sequences are absorbing and Bill Pohlad’s description of the creation of ‘Good Vibrations’ made me like it more than I ever have before. Pohlad and Oren Moverman have an understanding of pop biopic conventions and audience expectations – by conforming to and departing from these, they make Love and Mercy distinctive. We never hear a song in its entirety: this is tantalising and sometimes frustrating but it chimes with the emotionally unsettled quality of the story being told. The closing stages of the film are more conventional. There’s a degree of anti-climax in that but it’s a relief too that the good end happily and the bad unhappily – in fact. Because Brian Wilson is having such a traumatic time throughout, this is one occasion when you’re pleased to see closing images of the protagonist in real life and legends telling you he’s enjoyed a sustained renaissance as a singer-songwriter and an enduring marriage to the woman from whom, more than thirty years ago, he bought a Cadillac.
15 July and 9 September 2015
