Review: Love & Mercy

The story of Brian Wilson, chief songwriter for iconic American band, The Beach Boys. The film gives us both Wilson as a young musical genius in the 1960s (played by Paul Dano), and also in his mentally declining ‘lost’ years in the 1980s (now played by John Cusack). We see Brian’s struggle to win the approval of his critical and unfeeling father (Bill Camp), the heated internal dynamics between Brian and chiefly Mike Love (Jake Abel), his mental breakdown, and the serious manipulations by Brian’s doctor Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, as the nuttiest therapist in the history of cinema, possibly real-life), an uber-intense control freak who seems to be doing more harm than good for Brian. He’s also Brian’s legal guardian. Yep. Brian’s car saleswoman wife Melinda (Elizabeth Banks) is the one seen to attempt to cut the umbilical cord between Brian and his doctor/wannabe music producer.

 

Most of this 2015 biopic from director Bill Pohlad (a notable film producer in only his second directorial effort to date) is so very damn good, that it makes you even more ropeable that one horrendously bad casting decision and seriously lazy performance manages to torpedo the rest of it. I don’t think it’s bad enough to ruin the film as a whole, so I’m still recommending it, but it’s very evident very early on that one element sticks out like a painfully sore thumb.

 

First though, the good. Paul Dano, a hit-and-miss actor for me, is absolutely terrific and well-cast as the young Brian Wilson. Having not seen all that much footage of Wilson as a young man, to me Dano looks enough like him to pass, but more importantly gives a strong performance. It’s both his best work and best showcase as an actor to date. He certainly talks like the real Brian Wilson (the singing is a blend of Dano and Wilson…I couldn’t tell the difference!), and he’s a very easy sell in the role (The guy playing the young Mike Love…not so much). The film does a pretty good job at showing the jumbled-up nature of Brian’s brain after a while (it gets seriously messed-up in there), but for me the best scenes in the entire film are those where the wonderful sounds and songs were being created. That’s all fascinating stuff, and if you don’t love The Beach Boys, you don’t love music (Then again, Brian is at least 50% responsible for Wilson Phillips being a thing that existed, so his genius isn’t without flaw). Their music is spectacularly (yet simply) joyous, and at times it can even be moving. Sung by the late Carl Wilson but written by Brian, ‘God Only Knows’ is fucking poetry. The in-fighting between Wilson and Love is also interesting, and although Jake Abel looks nothing like Love (the guys playing young Carl Wilson and Al Jardine are decent likenesses), he pretty much plays the character as I’d expect him to be; A guy who believes in sticking to the formula of chicks, surf, and cars, and gets very easily impatient with Wilson’s more experimental and time-consuming ideas. For me, I get the frustrations, but I also get that Brian just wanted to get the sounds in his head exact on the record. Bill Camp, who seems to be everywhere these days (he was excellent in “The Night Of”, in particular) seems to be cementing a position as the new J.T. Walsh, someone who excels at playing humourless, colourless authority figures. In this case he plays the hard taskmaster Wilson family patriarch, whom Brian could seemingly do nothing to please. Hell, he didn’t even like ‘God Only Knows’, for crying out loud.

 

The other performances worth talking about in a positive sense come from Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti. Playing one of Brian’s wives, it’s not a great role for her but she looks absolutely sensational (which may or may not be relevant but I like to give an accurate reflection on my thoughts during the film) and despite the rather reactive nature of the role, is nonetheless really lovely and sweet. She’s a pleasure to have around, at the very least. Giamatti, in my view was probably deserving of an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of what appears to be a very psychopathic Dr. Eugene Landy. Giamatti actually doesn’t look anything like the real Landy, but since I didn’t (and I assume I’ll be far from the only one) have a clue what the guy looked like until I googled him after watching the film, it doesn’t matter so much. His performance is typically great from an actor who rarely under-delivers. Unfortunately these two performances are having to work overtime to compensate for the black hole at the centre of most of their scenes: John Cusack. Cusack can be an effective and often very likeable actor, but as the older, frazzled Brian Wilson, he brings less than nothing to the table. He looks and sounds like John Cusack going through a mild bout of Bell’s Palsy. So mild, in fact, that if this was Cusack’s half-arsed attempt at mimicking Wilson’s own rather slurred way of speaking, it registers more as Cusack just being slightly annoying. It’s noticeable, but barely enough to really call it an acting choice. Neither looking remotely like Wilson nor Dano, I’m not convinced Cusack was really doing anything except showing up on set and reading his lines. I wasn’t looking for simple mimicry, but since Brian Wilson is an immediately and worldwide recognisable figure, Cusack’s complete lack of resemblance to the man in look, sound, or performance is an egregious black mark on an otherwise fine film. Yes, the scenes with Dano’s younger Brian are also more interesting than the scenes Cusack gets to play, but Cusack almost torpedoes the fine work Banks and Giamatti are doing, and it could’ve potentially affected the entire film greatly, too. He made me legitimately angry, because everything else was working and Cusack was barely fucking acting at all. His every moment on screen was an unwanted intrusion for me, through no fault of any of the other actors. Every time he turned up I almost felt like it was a different film, or at least a completely different character with the same name of Brian Wilson. I wonder what the result would’ve been had they simply applied old-age makeup to Dano and had him play the entire role himself. Surely it couldn’t have been any worse than the non-effort Cusack delivers.

 

Even with a major miscasting issue, this is a good biopic (though I wasn’t especially enamoured with its back and forth narrative structure). However, if it weren’t for John Cusack, the film would be even better. Sensational soundtrack of some of the greatest music ever created (not just The Beach Boys stuff, either) helps, as do terrific performances by Paul Dano and a frightening Paul Giamatti. Correct decision to end the film with ‘Wouldn’t it Be Nice’, it’s one of those songs that just makes you happy. Certainly worth seeing, but with one major reservation. The screenplay is by Oren Moverman (writer/director of “The Messenger”) and Michael Alan Lerner (Writer of 1995’s “French Exit”).

 

Rating: B-