Review: Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson, the creative genius behind the Beach Boys, has had quite the life. His triumphs and tribulations could handily power half a dozen films. Love & Mercy, the outstanding biopic of this troubled man, avoids condensing the milestones into a digestive running time, and instead chooses to tell his story in two parallel narratives.

At the onset of the first narrative, which roughly covers the period from 1965 - 1969, the Beach Boys are at the height of popularity, their layered harmonies celebrating love, happiness and endless summers providing the soundtracks to their listeners' lives. The young Brian (Paul Dano), however, would rather be the man behind the music than performing on tour. After experiencing a panic attack during a flight, he convinces the rest of the band to continue on the Japanese leg of their tour without him. Citing the creative leap taken by The Beatles with Rubber Soul, he argues that they cannot allow themselves to be overtaken. "I can take us further," he promises, but only if they let him stay behind. They do, warning him to keep his head on straight, and he embarks on what would eventually be Pet Sounds, widely considered to be one of the most influential works in the history of music.

Unlike most films of this ilk, Love & Mercy does not skimp on the process of creation. If anything, it exalts in the methods of Brian's madness as he imparts his vision to the collective of studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. Aficionados and neophytes alike will delight as Brian lays down the precise number of bobby pins on the strings of a piano to extract the precise sound, incorporates a musician's accidental playing of a note, and even directs the barking of his dogs. A cello passage from "Good Vibrations" is repeated again and again until the desired effect is achieved...three hours later. Brian is no dictator - drummer Hal Blaine bolsters Brian's shaky confidence by touchingly telling him that the Wrecking Crew have worked with every possible star in the industry and Brian is, far and away, the best of the lot - but it becomes all too clear to the fellow Beach Boys, especially cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel), that they are becoming mere vocal instruments in the Brian Wilson Band.

Adding to Brian's stress is the band's general consensus that his latest tracks have strayed too far from the Beach Boys' template. "Even the happy songs are sad," Mike complains. Meanwhile, there is the guilt Brian harbours over firing his father Murry (Bill Camp) as the band's manager. It was his father, after all, who spurred him to writing better songs with his cutting, hard-to-please nature. Of "God Only Knows," which Paul McCartney declared as his favourite song of all-time, Brian's father deems it too wishy-washy and dismisses it as a suicide note disguised as a song.

A similarly sinister father figure dominates the second narrative, set in the 1980s when the older Brian (John Cusack) was a broken man, heavily medicated and severely under the control of his therapist Eugene Landy (a fearsome Paul Giamatti). "I am the control," he tells Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the former model turned Cadillac dealer who would go on to be Brian's second wife, before he lays down the rules for her seeing Brian: Tell me everything you do, everything he does, everything you say, everything he says. Brian seems cognizant of Eugene's unhealthy involvement in all aspects of his life but is highly incapable of severing ties despite Melinda's efforts to emancipate him.

Banks, always a firecracker of a presence, does some impressively subtle work here. Melinda recognises the gentle soul beneath the fractured and barely functional shell of a man, but is rightly stunned when the disarmingly honest Brian, with horrifying detachment, outlines the difference between the sound of a regular spanking and the sound of the beatings he received from his father (one such beating allegedly caused significant hearing loss in one ear). Banks also invigorates Cusack, whose portrayal is undoubtedly his best in years. What's particularly remarkable is how of a piece Cusack and Dano's performances are. When the real-life Brian Wilson closes the film with his intonation of the film's title, it does not feel jarring in the least. Both Cusack and Dano have captured not just his mannerisms, but his essence and spirit as well.

Often films with bifurcated narratives contain an imbalance - one narrative tends to be more intriguing than the other - but that is not the case here. Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner's screenplay weaves the strands of both narratives so seamlessly that they reinforce one another, acting as mirror images to reflect two pivotal moments when Brian Wilson was coming into his own, first as an artist and then as a man.

Let the achievement of director Bill Pohlad not go unpraised. A well-respected producer (Tree of Life, 12 Years a Slave) with only one film (1990's Old Explorer) as a director to his credit, Pohlad has a deceptively simple style that manages to marry flourish with formality. This is a film replete with retreat and confinement, yet never once does it feel claustrophobic. His manner of framing Brian just left or right of center elegantly conveys the musician's emotional discombobulation. The unforced but emphatic symbolism of the band in the swimming pool, the boys gathered in the shallow end whilst Brian struggles to stay afloat in the deep end, never feels contrived, even with the boys' punctuating line, "We're too shallow for the deep end."

Vibrant and effervescent, tender and stirring, the sonically rich, handsomely photographed, fluidly edited Love & Mercy is a haunting masterwork of an artist and all his complications, a wunderkind who pushed himself beyond the limits and, most of all, a survivor who lived to tell the tale.

Love & Mercy

Directed by: Bill Pohlad

Written by: Oren Moverman, Michael Alan Lerner

Starring: John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti, Bill Camp, Jake Abel