Biopic about former Beach Boy is myopic
★ 1/2
Starring: Paul Dano, John Cusack, Elizabeth Banks
Directed by: Bill Pohlad
Running time: 120 minutes
Some movies ruin it for everybody else.
Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) was such a perfect parody of pop-musician biographies that it pretty much demolished the form forever.
The main victim in Love & Mercy is director Bill Pohlad, who shoots scenes of the full regalia Pet Sounds recording sessions as if John C. Reilly hadn’t already been there and done that.
Ah, but you’re saying Walk Hard is a silly throwaway comedy while Love & Mercy is a serious dramatic feature about Brian Wilson — not a farcical composite like Dewey Cox but an actual musical icon whose life was touched by actual tragedy.
This may be so, but Pohlad’s film is quite funny, and mostly not on purpose. What’s really amusing is how bluntly it spells everything out to the viewer.
“You need to get out of the shallow end and join me here in the deep end,” pleads Wilson to his fellow Beach Boys during a poolside band meeting.
If writing is a process of killing one’s darlings, this is the kind of line that should have been dropped on its head.
Such dialogue turns Love & Mercy into a kind of accidental satire of its own sub-genre: Call it Surf Hard.
Neatly divided into two parallel plot lines depicting different periods in its subject’s life — his glamorous but increasingly stifling life as a Beach Boy in the late 1960s and his extended stint under quasi-house arrest 15 years later while in the care of the unscrupulous charlatan Dr. Eugene Landy — Love & Mercy means to provide a fully rounded perspective on a great artist.
But its vision is limited: It’s a myopic biopic. It gives us Wilson as a tortured genius, which may be true, but also reduces pretty much everyone else onscreen to a stereotype.
And while casting two actors as a man whose mind and body underwent radical changes over a short period of time is clever, watching Paul Dano and John Cusack take turns interpreting Wilson’s eccentricities soon grows monotonous. And the actors simply don’t match up well enough physically to sell the idea of a time-jumping narrative.
The Dano sections focus on Wilson’s growing alienation from the fame machine that has swallowed up the other Beach Boys, including Mike Love (Jake Abel), who thinks his bandmate’s experiments with full-regalia studio recordings are a waste of time.
Love is supposed to represent a lazy mainstream sensibility that doesn’t have the patience for an idiosyncratic album like Pet Sounds. But it’s the script that’s literal-minded: Instead of letting us perceive Wilson’s genius, it has other characters narrate it to us.
LOVE & MERCY