Paul Giamatti, John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks (Francois Duhamel/Roadside Attractions)
Brian Wilson’s 1988 solo single “Love and Mercy” is a song I don’t like by an artist I love. Ironically, it was originally released with a co-writing credit by the dastardly villain at the center of the Wilson biopic named after it. Love and Mercy has the kind of banal title I’d expect from the kind of by-the-numbers biopic I hate. But I didn’t hate it, despite inconsistent performances and one-dimensional heroes and villains—a Wilson song that would have made a better title.
The musician’s life story is so strange and disturbing that it almost survives the film’s flaws, but the movie is most watchable when it dispenses with mental struggles entirely and just observes Wilson’s obsessive mastery of the studio.
The film shifts between the ’60s, when the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) plied his ingenious craftsmanship to make some of the signature pop hits of the decade; and the ’80s, when an older Wilson (John Cusack) was under the questionable care of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) and courted car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks). Director Bill Pohlad not only uses two actors to portray this shift, but two distinct visual styles, much of the ’60s footage shot with Super-16 cameras give a great-looking vintage hue to recording sessions filmed in the very studios where the group made their classic records. The film footage looks great, but Pohlad overreaches and goes Lynchian with a ham-handed sequence of darkness and a close-up of the inner ear that demonstrates both Wilson’s partial deafness and mental disturbance.
Shots like that don’t work, and neither does much of Dano’s performance. Dude, if you want to stop getting typecast as a mooncalf, stop acting like one! The actor’s signature high-pitched quirks reach such heights that, at times, he seems to be channeling Latka Gravas. Dano’s been getting props for his performance anyway, but not John Cusack, who makes better aesthetic choices simply by not overacting. Cusack doesn’t even try to do much of an impersonation, which makes sense: he, too, is a badly aging former boy wonder.
Then there’s Giamatti’s scenery-chewing Landy. The actor has said that the true story of Landy, who exercised a control over Wilson that is painful to watch, is so strange that nobody would believe it. But Giamatti has not tempered his performance accordingly—his Landy is frightening alright, but the over-the-top villainy seems to belong to a very strange melodrama. Equally one-dimensional are portrayals of father Murry Wilson (Bill Camp) and cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel), who were, by all accounts, terrible people who constantly put down the boy genius and made him a nervous wreck.
Paul Dano (Francois Duhamel/Roadside Attractions)Don’t blame the actors – blame the script. Brian Wilson has said that the film scores points for historical accuracy, but that does not mean this accuracy was achieved with aesthetic elegance. Biopic exposition is all over the place, as when Wilson proudly speaks of the studio musicians known as The Wrecking Crew as “the best musicians in the world, but nobody’s ever heard of them! Isn’t that crazy?” Drummer Hal Blaine (Johnny Sneed) runs down a laundry list of musicians he’s worked for—Sinatra, Phil Spector, Sam Cooke—and tells Wilson that he’s the best. According to a recent documentary about the The Wrecking Crew, that’s exactly how the musicians felt about Wilson, continually surprised and challenged by his musical ideas. But it’s a clumsy, eye-rolling Biopic Moment.
Still, when you see Wilson urge session cellists to try something slightly different on their 32nd take of a “Good Vibrations” figure that takes maybe a few seconds on record, the film comes alive. Beach Boys fans will have to see this film if only out of curiosity, but like most biopics it’s an unsatisfying slice of a life, even if its failures aren’t always typical biopic failures. Love and Mercy may be more or less the truth, but its deepest truth isn’t the stuff of tell-all biography: the movie shows the kind of personal obsession and hard work that goes into a seemingly carefree pop masterpiece.
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Directed by Bill Pohlad
Written by Owen Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner
With Paul Dano, John Cusack, Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, drug content and language
Running time 120 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema, AMC Loews Georgetown, The Avalon, Regal Ballston, AMC Shirlington, Arclight Bethesda, Regal Majestic, AMC Hoffman, AMC Columbia
