Love & Mercy is not your typical musician biopic,
but rather an intense psychological portrait of its equally intense subject. It
recreates two of the most volatile and pivotal eras in the life of Beach Boys
maestro Brian Wilson, and uses these windows to gain insight into the artist's
brilliance and madness. Taking great pains to be faithful to Wilson's life and
experiences – and made with input from Wilson himself – the film takes us
inside his head, to a place where auditory hallucinations inspired some of the
most groundbreaking music of the 1960s... nearly at the cost of his sanity.
Driven by excellent performances and a fantastic, hallucinatory musical score,
director Bill Pohlad's film is exactly the powerful piece Wilson's story
deserves.
Love & Mercy weaves its psychological portrait by
cross-cutting between events at the start and end of Wilson's darkest period –
which came right on the heels of his strongest creative boom. Paul Dano plays a
young Brian in the mid-1960s, trying to harness the ever-worsening sounds in
his head to write his masterpiece Pet Sounds, while John Cusack plays a
middle-aged Brian in the late-1980s, struggling to find a way out of his long
nightmare. Both actors channel Wilson quite well, but give their performances a
soul that goes well beyond just a facsimile of a real person. Dano proves again
what a strong and unusual actor he is, as an awkward guy who struggles to
communicate verbally but comes vibrantly to life when creating art. And John
Cusack gives some of his best work of recent years as a lost soul emerging from
the dark. It's great to see him in a really strong role again. Also excellent
in supporting roles are Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti, as the two strongest
forces – for good and for bad – in the older Brian's life.
"I should buy a boat." |
Another crucial star of the film is the brilliant sound
design by Atticus Ross, who previously worked with Trent Reznor on the scores
for The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone
Girl. For the film to be successful in bringing us into Brian Wilson's
head, it is even more important for us to hear the world from his perspective
than to see it, as his auditory hallucinations play such a key role in both his
creative process and mental illness. Ross creates a surreal soundscape that is
at times ethereal and at other times frightening; a soundscape which uses bits
and pieces of Beach Boys songs in distorted and fragmented ways that turn them
into something else entirely, mixed with a cacophony of other sounds and
voices. This score alone is enough to make Love & Mercy a film to
see in theaters: Ross's aural maelstrom swirling around the speaker system of a
theater definitely brings an emotional urgency to Wilson's experiences, and
makes the audience share in his panic. The infectiously cheerful sounds of the
Beach Boys hits that these experiences inspired make for an incredibly striking
contrast.
Whether or not you are a fan of the Beach Boys or Brian
Wilson's music, this film works extremely well just as a portrait of mental
illness and creativity, and how closely the two are often tied together. With
excellent performances from all four leads and a great soundtrack that combines
classic Beach Boys with moody Atticus Ross orchestrations, this is an easy one
to recommend. It is a bit strange that this film was released so quietly during
the summer, and not saved for awards season. But then again, the music at the
film's core is so often associated with summer, so maybe it is only fitting
that this is when the true story behind it is told.
-Christopher S. Jordan