Skirting between madness and genius, Love & Mercy, the story of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, deftly portrays an artist driven to psychosis. With great performances and a 360-degree visual style that recreates an all-encompassing sense of anguish and agony, it’s effective in dramatizing what it feels like to lose one’s ability to connect to reality. The movie, which I saw in Hollywood Boulevard’s Cinerama Dome at a screening with Wilson, director Bill Pohlad and co-star Paul Dano (Prisoners, 12 Years a Slave), is too long and ponderous.
Also, and obviously, watching someone lose his mind in slow, encircling motions is not a pleasant experience. This is offset somewhat by a character played by Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games). She goes against Wilson’s gatekeeper (Paul Giamatti, San Andreas) to forge a safe, free bond with Wilson (John Cusack as an older adult) after the Beach Boys’ greatest success but before the resurgence of Wilson as a top artist (read my profile of Wilson’s guitarist Scott Bennett here). Thus, Love & Mercy is not a traditional biopic, though the genre is barely formed as a genre as it is.
Instead, Love & Mercy is a serialized tragedy in three interlocking, revolving parts with an emphasis on Paul Dano as young Wilson in the legendary southern California surf-rock band’s most creative period and with an upswing courtesy of the female lead.
Musically, do not expect any but the most exhaustive examination of Brian Wilson and only Brian Wilson and, unless you’re intimately familiar with the Beach Boys, do not expect a chronological career trajectory like Jersey Boys. The deconstruction of “Good Vibrations”, a huge Beach Boys’ hit which later was the basis of a 1990s’ rap song, is a fascinating glimpse at the climax of Wilson’s breakdown and triumph.
Thematically, Love & Mercy lacks nuance and certain key details, insinuating that Wilson’s decline into madness was caused by his father, his bandmates and his psychiatrist, which seems overly simple even on the movie’s terms. Mental illness and its treatment are extremely difficult to diagnose and medicate and Love & Mercy would benefit from a basic orientation and guide to some of what Wilson was going through. As Wilson himself indicated in his post-screening comments, differentiating and dealing with what may be paranoid schizophrenia or some other condition is not easy to judge, let alone depict with clarity and understanding. The whole net experience of the film is alternately too disorienting and disturbing to know when to laugh and when to cry.
Psychologically, the Banks character, the easiest for general audiences to identify with, is also the most elusive. Would an ex-model selling Cadillacs really chase after an ex-rocker who’s taken too many acid trips? Perhaps, and Banks makes Melinda, the character’s name, believable. With lingering journeys and flashbacks, it is hard to track, follow and integrate the story. As Wilson, Dano and his older counterpart, John Cusack, are excellent and Giamatti is chilling as a mental health therapist with questionable tactics and practices.
Love & Mercy, as by now should be clear, is hard to watch. But it is engrossing, especially when one considers the context of the times. The drug culture figures into Wilson’s decline very interestingly, just as he’s becoming aware of the need to liberate himself from his abusive parent. It’s there to draw him into the death spiral of the hippies’ lifestyle and it does, which the movie shows (though it spares Wilson the fact of the band’s affiliation with mass murderer Charles Manson, who embodies the essence of the hippies’ philosophy). But, as Steve Jobs argued (I think mistakenly), the drug culture fed some of the brightest minds, too. Whatever one thinks of drugs, rock, the Beach Boys and Wilson, Love & Mercy‘s heartbreaking, if selective and wrenching, plea to love and understand those who are not easy to love and understand, comes across.