We tend to throw the word “genius” around. Invent a lifehack that saves thirty seconds in the bathroom? Genius. Post something clever to Facebook and get more than a handful of “likes?” Genius. What about creating an album so far ahead of its time that even critical acclaim can’t sell it to an unprepared audience? Depends on how many re-tweets it gets?
Love & Mercy sets out to explore “the life, love and genius of Brian Wilson,” the man behind the Beach Boys and a reestablished solo artist who very much deserved the aforementioned title. It succeeds. As Wilson himself was haggard and tried almost beyond imagining, so too does his biopic confront the very precipice of human pain and endurance. It’s no picnic, but it’s still a stylized engagement of the senses that will delight anything with a pulse and half a brain. If you cherish or even mildly appreciate music, Love & Mercy will set up a cozy home in your heart and refuse to vacate.
At their peak, the Beach Boys rivaled even the almighty Beatles in notoriety and musical success. Driven by the band’s mutual thirst for fame and fear of faltering, Wilson struggles against mounting pressure and developing psychoses in pursuit of a masterpiece album, Pet Sounds. Simultaneously, we travel twenty years into the future to watch him battle to escape a vicious cycle of depression and abuse, guided to recovery by the incredible Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).
Vintage stock footage, spliced with engineered extensions, lays the groundwork for a stunning dual narrative that sets a young Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) on a collision course with his own hollow, broken future (John Cusack). Dano’s world is crisp and brilliant, shining with optimism through a warm, vintage palette that one misses every time the cold reality of Cusack, with its mellow blues and stark whites, crawls back onto the screen. There’s an intermingling of fear and intrigue that would be wearying if not for the patient, caring and powerful direction of Banks’s Ledbetter.
Stacked up against the manipulative Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, boldly despicable as always in such roles), Banks is almost inhumanly patient, passionate and kind. She is a much-needed injection of hope in the darker scenes; a deserved payoff for the beauty of Wilson’s youth as captured by Director Bill Pohlad and the pens of Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner.
While Dano’s Wilson is as jovial as he is visionary for much of the film, the actor shares plenty of heavy lifting work with Cusack. The pair are two halves of an incredible whole, sentimentally charming, boldly optimistic and quietly tragic in a complex and interwoven performance with all the sweet, careful layering of a 1-percenter’s wedding cake. Love & Mercy wastes nothing from its talented cast, complementing their stirring performances with potent sound design befitting the source material.
The film treats viewers to the gorgeous strains of Wilson’s most recognizable works, pushing past expectation to deliver an escapist experience that invites us to see the world as Wilson does. Sounds wash in and out, music is everywhere, and silence carries a weight almost more terrifying than the startling crescendos neatly executed by a fearless sound crew. It’s almost as fun to listen to this film as it is to watch Dano bring Pet Sounds to life on screen.
Still, there’s a sense of eager emptiness throughout the project. It rushes into some moments and glides through others, coasting on the talent of its performers through scenes and relationships that in any other hands might have been completely outlandish. At the end of all this exploration, its conclusion is abrupt; rising and fading away too swiftly to bring the artistry of the 118 or so minutes that came before to a satisfying conclusion. It’s as though Pohlad & Co. deemed their efforts too perfect to be touched again by human hands and left the script to speak for itself before it had really decided what it wanted to say. Its voice is sonorous, but it’s more performer than philosopher.
Overall, Love & Mercy is fittingly tough and beautifully artistic, even if it lacks direction at times. It is, more than anything, a human story. And since when do those come in neat packages?
Steven was able to attend a pre-screening of Love & Mercy during the Dallas International Film Festival. This review was held at the request of the film’s promotional team and scheduled to coincide with the film’s release. Drop by the DIFF archives for more festival content, and be sure to follow us on twitter and on Facebook for updates in real time.
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