A Beach Boy’s good and bad vibrations
Love & Mercy (out of 4) Starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti. Directed by Bill Pohlad. At GTA theatres. 121 minutes. 14A A perfect curl followed by a wipeout.
That’s the momentous wave of Brian Wilson’s life as the Beach Boys’ musical genius, or so the legend goes. It’s surfed to dramatic but polarizing effect in the biopic Love & Mercy, directed by Bill Pohlad, best known as the producer of The Tree of Life and 12 Years a Slave.
Paul Dano and John Cusack play younger and older versions of Wilson, in a narrative that skips between the 1960s and 1980s. Both are fully invested in their shared role, but there is visual dissonance: Dano strongly resembles Wilson while Cusack doesn’t.
Dano, never better, plays the teen to twenty-something Brian of the ’60s, a chubby-cheeked introvert who overcame parental abuse and paralyzing shyness to craft the surfer image and close-harmony California pop sound heard ’round the world.
He perfectly evokes the Beach Boy in look, voice (lip-synched for singing) and eccentric recording techniques, as he struggles to get on tape “the music I hear in my head.”
Brian’s brutal and disdainful father Murry (Bill Camp) almost ends his son’s pop career before it starts. He administers a smack to the head that leaves Brian almost completely deaf in one ear.
Yet Brian rises above his disability and fears to craft such Beach Boys classics as “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations,” and to challenge the Beatles for pop chart supremacy.
He coaxes skeptical studio musicians through the creation of “Good Vibrations,” the 1966 “pocket symphony” recorded along with that year’s landmark Pet Sounds album, but released later as a single.
Cusack, a compelling actor but visual jolt, plays the 1980s Wilson. He’s the diminished Beach Boy, approaching middle age, whose songwriting has faded along with his mental health.
Diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, a condition blamed in part on his earlier experiments with psychedelic drugs, Brian is under the 24/7 control of Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a controversial psychologist and therapist.
This version of Wilson is so glazed, he’s an empty vessel for the Svengali ambitions of Landy and the confused love of Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the Cadillac saleswoman and former model who would become Wilson’s second wife in 1995.
Love & Mercy feels like two movies, with the Dano one being considerably stronger than the Cusack one. Pohlad, working with screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, wanted to avoid the standard biopic approach and you can’t fault their ambition. Moverman had prior experience with multiple takes on a single figure: he co-wrote Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, in which six actors play Bob Dylan.
My preference for Love & Mercy would have been a continuous narrative with a single actor — couldn’t makeup have been used to age Dano through the decades?
Perhaps if Dano didn’t resemble the younger Wilson so much, then Cusack’s rough approximation of the older one wouldn’t have seemed so jarring, to me at least. Your mileage on this little deuce coupe may vary.
Love & Mercy is without doubt a valuable addition to rock ’n’ roll cinema. It offers a glimpse into the making of immortal pop tunes, songs of love and longing that are all the more astonishing considering the mental anguish their creator was enduring.