Love & Mercy (2014)

If you’re a fan of The Beach Boys, at some point you’ll have reached a realisation. You’ll have discovered that the band’s catalogue separates into two halves: the fun surfer songs and the greatest music ever written. Surfin’ USA belongs in the former category while God Only Knows belongs in the latter. For every Fun Fun Fun or I Get Around there’s a Wouldn’t it Be Nice or a Good Vibrations. Once this separation is made, The Beach Boys cease to exist as a homogenous group of performers. They become individuals, and Brian Wilson emerges as the greatest talent in the history of popular music.

Love and Mercy is a bifurcated biopic. It studies two sections of Wilson’s life: his studio wizardry during the 1960s and the misery of his virtual imprisonment during the 1980s. Paul Dano plays the younger Wilson, a nervous elfin innocent in his 20s who avoids air travel and touring with his band, preferring to stay in Los Angeles and compose new music in the studio. While his brothers play surf tunes in Japan, Brian decides to try some unorthodox new recording techniques. He gathers LA’s greatest session musicians and has them play in different keys while he records the sounds of barking dogs and railway trains. Within the studio, Brian creates brand new music: multi-layered and irregular compositions that transform the band’s easy-going pop sound into symphonic, avant-garde art. Wilson becomes an experimental perfectionist, annoying his cautious cousin Mike Love by hiring top-notch cellists to repeat a short section of music for hours on end.

Brian’s mental health suddenly declines. After becoming increasingly paranoid and suffering audio hallucinations, Brian withdraws from public life, spending three years alone in his bedroom. As an older man, Wilson is played by John Cusack. In his weakened state, Brian has fallen under the exploitative ‘care’ of Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a psychologist to the stars who misdiagnoses Brian as a paranoid schizophrenic and medicates him into a stupor. Brian is placed on a restrictive diet, separated from his family and subjected to constant supervision while Dr Landy takes over one of his properties. A car saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) meets Brian and comes to care for him. Recognising Landy’s scheme, Melinda sets out to free Brian from the doctor’s grasp and have his condition diagnosed properly.

I think of Love & Mercy as the angelic alternative to the glut of star biopics that have swamped Hollywood over the last decade. The stories of Freddie Mercury, Judy Garland, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Amy Winehouse and Elton John have all made it to the big screen over the past ten years, without leaving much of a mark. Jeremy Allen White will play Bruce Springsteen this October, a Michael Jackson movie will come out next year and all four members of the Beatles will have individual biopics in 2028. I’m not enthused about any of these films, as they tend to fall into the trap of uninspired predictability. They recite the well-known facts about the star’s life, wallow in the sadder moments and play the big hits at the end of each act. This is an uninspired formula, and it’s been repeated ad nauseum. Love & Mercy is different.

Rather than focusing on Wilson’s relationship with his family, his rise to stardom or his celebrity, Love & Mercy wisely focuses on the different aspects of his mind: the creative and the destructive. This is a film about the magic of invention. In Love & Mercy’s most engaging sequences, director Bill Pohlad gathers a crew of real-life musicians and has them play the parts of the LA session musicians contracted by Brian Wilson during the recordings of Pet Sounds and the unfinished album Smile. Handheld camerawork creates a feeling of spontaneity as Wilson walks between cellists, guitarists and percussionists, alleviating their concerns, responding positively to their improvisations and coaching new techniques. Classic tunes come together piece by piece as Wilson satisfyingly reshapes odd sounds into the perfect arrangements that we’re all familiar with today. This is the film’s heart: not Brian Wilson’s icon status, but his talent for experimentation. These studio scenes are electrifying highlights, loose snippets charged with Wilson’s passion and creative spirit.

The music is never lazily dropped for cheap effect. Atticus Ross’s excellent original score weaves together elements from a range of great Beach Boys tunes, and time is spent establishing the constituent pieces of each track before they’re played in full. The musical highlight is an inspired mash-up of two of Wilson’s most contemplative and melancholy songs: Til I Die and In My Room. This combination scores an exquisite montage, simultaneously tracking Wilson’s downfall and resurrection. But for one glorious exception, the unedited Beach Boys tracks aren’t used in the manner of conventional movie needledrops. They don’t underscore a scene’s emotional tone and they aren’t used purely to press home the band’s influence or legacy. Each is used functionally, presented to the audience as the product of Wilson’s superhuman work ethic. This allows the movie to avoid the pitfalls of biopic superficiality, allowing the subject’s achievements to blend into the guts of its story. Creativity, success and despair meld into an unstoppable flow of energy pulsing through Brian Wilson’s brain.

The casting is inspired. Paul Dano is the perfect choice for Brian Wilson, matching the Beach Boy’s looks, tics and manner with shocking ease. His performance isn’t an imitation: it’s an assimilation. There is no Paul Dano, only the young Brian Wilson. The man that we’re shown is energetic and determined, too young to conform and too driven to stop. Wilson hears the music in his mind, but he starts to hear other noises too, as his muse bleeds into something more sinister and debilitating. Dano allows this internal struggle to play out across his face: the boyish grin disappears, his eyes widen and his look becomes manic, afraid and powerless. It’s a great screen performance. Cusack wisely understates his portrayal of the drugged Wilson, gazing into space and giving up information without a filter. He’s a troubled man medicated to appear untroubled, calmly stepping through empty days and suffering in tranquil silence.

The dual narrative structure isn’t just a gimmick; it’s an effective way of considering the two key moments of Wilson’s life and the unexpected connections between them. Wilson’s stern and disapproving father, Murry, becomes a mirror image of the creepily paternalistic Eugene Landy. There’s always a father figure lurking near Brian, threatening violence, controlling the finances and reducing the musician into a shell of himself. In the 60s segments, Brian is often surrounded by positive company. He has friends, musicians, lyricists and close family by his side, hyping up his creativity, picking apart his studio techniques or checking up on him. These scenes are shot on film and saturated with warm colours: reds, golds and dark greens. In the 1980s, Brian is either alone or guarded by quiet, unsmiling men. These scenes are shot in blank whites and clean blues: the colours of a spotless bathroom. Notice how Pohlad frames Cusack’s face during a dinner scene: it’s a blurred reflection in a mirror. The musician is barely there. This direction is smart and unobtrusive, helping the story along rather than hijacking it.

I first saw this film in a difficult emotional state. I had just finished my final year at university and was stuck at home, frantically searching for a job through a baking hot summer. I was scared, I missed my friends and I was convinced that I’d end up working the worst job on Earth, permanently. Love and Mercy was a profound comfort, a beacon of empathy that glowed with a humanist warmth. Its music and its story comforted me, with Brian’s story a powerful reminder that new beginnings are possible, that the death of good years doesn’t mean the death of all hope. I continue to be touched by this biopic and its tender reverence for its subject. Without trying to diagnose Wilson’s mind or over-emphasise his positive qualities, it tells a compelling story about a great creative and his struggles. The past is meshed within the present, the good interlocked with the bad. Brian Wilson’s greatness and susceptibility are shown to exist on the same mysterious plain, mirroring each other and feeding from one another.