Love & Mercy **** (2014, John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti) – Movie Review

The story of the Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson makes for an excellent, riveting movie. It is grippingly told and imaginatively filmed by director Bill Pohlad. The screenplay by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner has a dual time frame narrative, moving backwards and forwards from the Sixties when the pop star is played by Paul Dano to the Eighties when he is played by John Cusack.

In the 1960s Brian Wilson is struggling with emerging psychosis and heading for a mental breakdown as he attempts to craft his avant-garde pop masterpiece Good Vibrations, while trying to please his abusive father. But in the 1980s, he is a broken, confused man under the 24-hour watch of shady therapist Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) when he meets car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) while buying one of her fancy cars.

The acting is exciting, with Cusack and Dano remarkable as the older and younger Brian Wilsons, the normally amiable and amusing Giamatti chilling and Banks sensational as Melinda – in many ways it seemed to be her story.

The period atmosphere and the classic vintage songs are the icing on the tasty cake. The clip of Brian Wilson over the end credits is really moving in the context of the film.

Love & Mercy is the title of a song written by Brian Wilson and the opening track of his solo album Brian Wilson, released July 1988.

Dano alternates between singing and lip-syncing to original recordings of Wilson’s singing. The studio scenes are improvised in a unrehearsed documentary style with two 16mm handheld cameras. Dano, who once played in a band, was really directing the performers, real life musicians, on how to play their instruments. These scenes are mostly unscripted, but Dano quotes lines spoken by Wilson from the original Pet Sounds session tapes.

Pohlad encouraged Dano and Cusack not to interact during filming.

Lerner’s original screenplay version, entitled Heroes and Villlains, focused largely on Wilson’s life between 1982 and 1993 with flashbacks to the Sixties, and ending with Wilson completing Smile in 2004.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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