Love and Mercy

When I was young, my mom would drive my siblings and I to the beach practically everyday. It was the same stretch of road, to the same beach. The same routine all summer long and I remember it through the music. She would play Shania Twain's album, "Come on Over", a UB40 record, or a mix of the best of the Beach Boys. It was mainly the latter, it was summer, and we were going to the beach after all. Those songs, and the melodies behind them have cemented in my mind, I don't forget them. They have always and will always be around. As with the best type of art they evoke a feeling, a specific sense of time and place that somehow transcends its origin. I'm positive even people who didn't grow up near the beach amidst the surroundings that Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys sang about, continue to remember "Surfin' USA", "409", "I Get Around", and "Good Vibrations" with fondness. These songs remain eternal, yet what about the five young men behind those songs, and especially Brian Wilson, the band's leader?

The new film, "Love and Mercy", focusing on Brian Wilson, is an exceptionally sensitive portrait of an artist at two different stages of life. In the 1960's, around the time between "Surfin' Safari" and the release of the Beach Boy's masterpiece "Pet Sounds", we get Paul Dano, round faced, endlessly curious, a genius being born. And some 20 years later, after a physical and mental breakdown, and the demise of the Beach Boys, we get John Cusack, sunken eyed, pursed lipped, and in constant risk of falling apart. Shifting back and forth between these two sequences, the director Bill Pohlad, working from a script by Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner, gives us Wilson as an inspired musician and a genius work horse, who through the use of drugs like LSD and the mental abuse of two men transformed into a hollow shell of his former self. Those two central men in his life, his father Murry (Bill Camp), and eventually his personal guardian and doctor Eugene Handy (Paul Giamatti) were horrifically destructive figures. Equal parts overbearing and critical, his father is portrayed as the more subdued villain, yet probably the most damaging. Physical abuse goes a long way. We learn he was fired as the band's manager, now forever undermining and holding a grudge against the group, and mainly Brian. His abuse lays the groundwork for the abuse Brian faces from Dr. Handy after the LSD and after ballooning to 300 pounds. Giamatti does not underplay his evil and the tirades against John Cusack are out of a different film and remain some of the more uncomfortable scenes in the film. 

Paul Dano as the young Brian Wilson in "Love and Mercy" 

"Love and Mercy" does have an angelic figure in the form of Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who we meet in the very first scene, selling Cadillacs. There, seated in the passenger seat of a car she hopes to sell, she listens to Brian confess that his brother died, not too long ago, his face blank. He comments that blue is a "very calming color". She listens attentively not because she knows who he is but because she senses someone who needs to be listened to. He leaves her a final, frightening note, scribbled on the back of her business card that sets the film in dramatic motion: "Lonely. Scared. Frightened." Ultimately, Melinda becomes Brian's savior, rescuing him from Dr. Handy, who not only verbally abuses Brian, but takes advantage of his bogus diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by over drugging him and manipulating his finances. Banks, whose smile radiates kindness, gives a performance of tremendous empathy and warmth. Her presence and face tell us everything we need to know about how to respond to this particular Brian Wilson. Melinda is window that we as the audience look through to get to understand Brian. The scenes between Banks and Cusack are filmed almost entirely in close up, we listen in rapt attention when they speak back and forth. Every twitch in Cusack's mouth, and every emotion in Banks eyes are right there up close for us to see. 

One of the best parts about being a movie fan is learning more about the cultural world in which we come from. I may have endlessly listened to the Beach Boys when I was younger, their songs may have echoed in the background of the restaurant I served at, but I didn't understand their impact, and in particular the genius and ground breaking musical work of Brian Wilson. The most compelling scenes of "Love and Mercy" show the young Brian Wilson in the studio, hearing voices, doing drugs, running laps around the expert musicians that surround him. His constant need to experiment with new sound, test new methods of musical composition, and ring every last potential drop of power from those gorgeous harmonies are shown in montages that are both jumbled and have an extreme emotional clarity. It is quite amazing that the tragedy of Wilson's life as a man undone by drugs and abuse only to rise somewhat again in the future doesn't diminish the power of his legacy as an artist. In one scene we see Wilson playing "God Only Knows" to his father, in a premature version, singing purely, a pitchy falsetto, accompanying himself on the piano. The song hums true, sad. It's hard to even notice his father's disapproving scowl, the song drowns out everything else in the frame. You see the song, instead of hear it. We are left with Wilson at his most vulnerable, alone yet being watched, and he goes beyond the primal immediacy of just singing into something more spiritual, something along the lines of the sacred. Turns out you don't need LSD to know when a song is going to last, or to tell you how to feel. Only God knows that.