Screenplay Written by Michael Alan Lerner and Oren Moverman
Directed by Bill Pohlad
**** (four stars)
RATED PG 13
"Every time I get the inspiration
To go change things around
No one wants to help me look for places
Where new things might be found
Where can I turn when my fair weather friends cop out
What's it all about...
...Sometimes I feel very sad..."
-"I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"
Lyrics by Tony Asher
Music by Brian Wilson
Performed by The Beach Boys
Dear readers, in a cinematic year that has already proven itself to be uncomfortably barren in terms of high quality new releases, "Love And Mercy," Director Bill Pohlad's enormously moving and creatively audacious biopic of The Beach Boys' restlessly innovative musical genius Brian Wilson, is far and away the best film I have seen so far in 2015.
As with The Beach Boys' finest, most wondrous music, Pohlad has created a brilliantly multi-layered film of tremendous empathy as well as one of a creative audaciousness that not only makes for exciting, bracing, thrilling cinema but should also make it a serious contender during awards season... that is, if the powers-that-be have any discernible sense or a beating heart anywhere amongst themselves.
While the box office behemoths of sequels, re-boots and re-imaginings will indeed run rampant over the multiplexes and box offices, I cannot urge you enough to make the time to head out and see this film. Trust me on this one and especially if you have ever been a regular visitor to this site, I would not steer you in the wrong direction. Just know that one does not have to be a fan or know even one thing about Brian Wilson's life or the music of The Beach Boys in order to be affected by "Love And Mercy," as Pohlad has ensured that his artistic vision transcends the musicology and flies divinely into the heights and depths of the human spirit, thus making an experience that blissfully speaks to the soul.
Eschewing the standard "rise-fall-rise again" format of most biopic films, "Love And Mercy" examines and explores Brian Wilson during two distinct and alternately presented periods within his life. First, we have the mid to late 1960's as Wilson (played by Paul Dano) is suffering with panic attacks birthed from the rigors of concert touring. This affliction plus the psychological and physical abuse from the hands of his domineering and creatively jealous Father, Murray Wilson (Bill Camp), which has left him essentially deaf in one ear, inspires Brian Wilson to retire from the road to solely concentrate upon composing, recording and producing as the remainder of The Beach Boys continue to perform live.
Armed with a insatiable desire to create the greatest music ever recorded, a desire itself inspired by a healthy sense of artistic competition with The Beatles, we are witness to Brian Wilson beginning the process of serving only the sounds in his head as he embarks upon creating the innovative (and now iconic) music that would become The Beach Boys' masterpiece "Pet Sounds" as well as the music that would become the long abandoned follow up "SMiLE." While his constant inventiveness has wowed the crack team of studio musicians forever known as "The Wrecking Crew," Brian Wilson's studio experimentations, piercing lyrical introspectiveness and symphonic musical arrangements, worlds away from the standard commercial fare of guitars, cars and girls, meets the considerable disdain of his band mates, most notably the openly combative Mike Love (an excellent Jake Abel).
With dreams of artistic glory clashing with commercial failures and disappointment from his closest associates, combined with a descent into drugs, an increase in paranoia plus the growing cacophony inside of his mind, Brian Wilson slowly begins to lose his grip of reality.
Flash forward to the late 1980's as Brian Wilson (played by John Cusack), over-medicated, depressed, psychologically damaged and under the constantly malevolent control of therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), begins to emerge from the dark shadows of his life as he hopes to rebuild his sanity, find new love and overall life purpose with car saleswoman Melinda Leadbetter (an excellent Elizabeth Banks who grows in power over the course of the film).
Bill Pohlad's "Love And Mercy" is an undeniably sensational and emotionally overwhelming experience. It is remarkable to me that while focusing on just two periods within Brian Wilson's life story, Pohlad has somehow been able to give us a complete portrait of this iconic musical figure as well as a front row seat into the triumphs and tragedies that made and nearly destroyed him. It is a masterful piece of filmmaking, alternating effortlessly between the 1960's to the 1980's, each decade informing and playing off of each other and ultimately weaving a tapestry that builds to an emotional well spring, as Pohlad has fashioned an experience that transcends music and flows from themes of imprisonment to empowerment, selfishness to selflessness, clarity to madness, depression, anxiety, the long ranging damages of physical and psychological abuse, the healing powers of love and acceptance and all in between.
At points, watching the 24 year old Brian Wilson, and with only one functional ear at that, creating music for the ages in one sequence after another, reminded me quite a bit of Director Milos Forman's "Amadeus" (1984), as that film also showcased the astounding gifts of a certain youthful musical prodigy who broke all manner of musical conventions to advance the medium and art form forwards, and creating music for the ages in the process. It is here where Pohlad utilizes his film to serve as a deeply heartfelt ode to inspiration and creation, and the process during which what exists inside one's brain becomes vibrantly real and is ultimately released into the world.
Special mention must also be given to Composer Atticus Ross, who has devised what is essentially a sound collage taken from a healthy selection of Beach Boys songs, sessions and ambient material and has altered them into soundscapes that function as an additional layer in fleshing out the cinematic character of Brian Wilson, by serving as the sounds within his head that voyage from the peaks of artistic glory to the bowels of psychological despair. Making the sounds function as much of a character as the dialogue and performances, Ross injects a hallucinogenic and increasingly harrowing element to the proceedings that demands awards season attention as well.
Beyond the music, Pohlad has ensured that "Love And Mercy" extends from its primary musical subject matter to exist as a personal story that not only contains much inherent drama and power but is also as universal as it is individualistic. I was curious while watching "Love And Mercy" if the groundwork of having two actors portray the same figure, yet during different stages within one life, in this idiosyncratic fashion was possibly laid by Writer/Director Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" (2007), a film in which six actors, including Cate Blanchett, portrayed various incarnations of Bob Dylan's musical and public persona--a film that still feels ahead of the curve, and for some viewers, to an almost impenetrable degree. While Pohlad's cinematic vision is not as esoteric as Haynes', and decidedly warmer and more accessible, "Love And Mercy" is no less daring, equally as brilliant, and fueled astonishingly by the dual leading performances by John Cusack and Paul Dano.
As the middle aged Brian Wilson in the 1980's, I firmly believe that John Cusack has delivered the finest performance of his entire career. While Cusack does not physically resemble the real Brian Wilson, what he achieved was a quietly wrenching performance that truly felt as if it was feverishly created from the inside out, from the soul itself to tangible flesh. In fact, it feels like a performance that serves as almost the anti-thesis to much of Cusack's career and cinematic persona as he has consistently portrayed figures who possess a great verbal wit and an intellectual sharpness. But for his role as Brian Wilson, Cusack plays a figure who exists as a shell of his former self, physically sedentary, his mind and spirit dulled by drugs and internal trauma and now essentially exists as a man beaten into submission by a lifetime of abuse by various Father figures--from his actual Father to Dr. Landy and to an extent, Mike Love--and the demons in his head.
Cusack instantly creates sympathy in his very first scene as he attempts to purchase a Cadillac from Melinda Leadbetter, to whom he is smitten seemingly instantly, and awkwardly tries to forge a conversation and connection while under constant surveillance by Dr. Landy's handlers. Before being whisked away by Dr. Landy, Wilson hands Melinda a card on which he has quickly scrawled the words "Lonely. Scared. Frightened." And here is where we find Brian Wilson, the now legendary creator of classic songs, as well as one of the greatest rock albums ever made, no longer making music, filled with regrets from divorce and failed fatherhood to his two daughters, and forced to live his adult life as an eternally alone and abused child, unable to navigate the world on his own terms yet still harboring a voice buried deep inside himself, slowly tunneling itself upwards and outwards.
To date, I have never seen John Cusack deliver a performance that is so unguarded, where the pain, sorrow and desperation for release is so unnerving, tangible, vulnerable and even mesmerizing to the point where you can almost see Paul Dano's face inside of his own. Just outstanding.
As the younger Brian Wilson, Paul Dano's superlative, transformative, and shattering performance will flatten you with its powerful fragility and graceful strength. While Dano more closely resembles the real Brian Wilson during the era of the 1960's, and also performs some of his own singing, which formulates a seamless musical flow in the film, what Dano has achieved so masterfully is to somehow find the magical space where the audience can believe in his musical genius during the recording sequences while also simultaneously seeing the eternally wounded child during moments of condescension from his family and friends and the tortured artist during sequences of his impending psychological breakdown and the fears that he will never be fully understood by anyone.
Like Cusack, Paul Dano performs the role with great empathy, always showing us the three dimensional and flawed human being behind the icon, and also unearthing the finest performance of his career thus far and one I am seriously hoping receives awards season attention for he is that voluminous.
For both actors, they have beautifully crafted a character study of an individual's life long road to independence as well as the profound psychological damage that occurs through being perpetually abused, which is Brian Wilson's case, leaves him shell shocked, shut in, and bed ridden. Watching Brian Wilson fall, house the desire to re-emerge but who just cannot find the will or strength to do so, as evidenced in especially painful scenes when he cowers in fear from Dr. Landy or expresses the futility of escape to Melinda, "Love And Mercy" extends itself further from being a film about Brian Wilson into being a film about all of us.
Think of any times within your own lives when the obstacles have grown to become so seemingly insurmountable that you feel that all there is to do is surrender. How do we find the means to continue and have we ever known of anyone who just could not do so anymore? What help did we receive, if any? Who showed us tenderness in the precise moment that it was needed, if at all?
Bill Pohlad's "Love And Mercy" is a film that is so beautifully about the words contained within its own title, itself the name of a song from Brian Wilson's 1988 self-titled comeback solo album. It is amazing to me that the real Brian Wilson has survived and endured beyond the pains and past tragedies within his life but even so, how have we all performed the same exact feats?
As Brian Wilson himself sang upon the melancholic "Pet Sounds" selection "Put Your Head On My Shoulder," he implores us to "LISTEN! LISTEN!" That is also what Bill Pohlad's "Love And Mercy" implores of us as well. To LISTEN. To FEEL. To UNDERSTAND. To always remember that everyone is housing some level of internal pain and suffering to varying degrees and if we encounter someone in just the right moment, we just may be the architect of inspiration to try and engage with life again.
And in doing so, "Love And Mercy" is a film of unquestionably great music but more importantly, it is a film of even greater humanity.
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