Love & Mercy

Bill Pohland – 2014 – USA

Successful producer Bill Pohland returns to directing for the first time in twenty-four years (and for the second time in his life) with this bio-pic about Brian Wilson, the tormented genius behind the music of The Beach Boys.  While it has a lot of great things in it, Love & Mercy is a terribly conflicted movie, almost schizophrenic, and not in a way, I don’t think, that was intended to mirror Wilson’s own emotional troubles.  There are really two different films here, and they don’t function well together at all.  One is a quite impressive recreation of the 60s as Wilson (Paul Dano) struggles against business pressures, fame, and psychological demons to get the bold and experimental music in his head out into the world and shaped into records that the public will buy.  While maybe a little young, or at least boyish, for the part, Dano is very good as Wilson during this period, and the costume, sound and production design are all exceptional.  The other film, however, is a startlingly dry, by-the-numbers, TV-style true-life docu-drama about Wilson in the 80s that is awkwardly intercut with the 60s scenes.  I don’t dislike John Cusak, but at no point during the film did I buy him as Wilson, (and not only because he bears no resemblance to Dano); he’s always just John Cusak, no one else.  This is all unfortunate, because the story of Wilson’s relationship with his Svengali-like psychiatrist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), is a fascinating one that could even warrant its own film.  The prototype for this dual storyline format is certainly The Godfather, Part II, but while the past and present complement and influence each other in that film, here they have no meaning at all and seem to have been spliced together by a journeyman editor who had no feeling for the material.  Judging by the apparent involvement of the real-life Brian Wilson, who is conspicuously thanked in the credits and appears in a concert clip singing the title song, it’s safe to assume that the film is the cinematic equivalent of an “authorized biography,” and that is often a serious problem in such films since both objectivity and artistic rigor tend to take a back seat to “setting the record straight.”  I read one biography of The Beach Boys many years ago, and I didn’t learn anything new by watching Love & Mercy, nor did I glean any thought-provoking perspectives or insights.  Everything that’s supposed to happen happens, not much more.