By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog
If you dig Rock ‘n Roll music like I dig Rock ‘n Roll music, then hie your fanfanny to the nearest multiplex to catch “Love and Mercy,” the new and unique bio-pic about Brian Wilson, the afflicted artistic genius behind The Beach Boys.
Wait a minute, many of you ask: “Where does he get off writing a movie review on a conservative political blog, especially about a film that’s as un-Jersey as they come?”
Glad you asked, because there are two appropriate answers: (1) Because “L&M” has a message those on the Right get and live, and (2) Because I can. And The Beach Boys are the consensus favorite to be “America’s Band,” so there’s that, too.
“Love and Mercy” is a story chock full of conservative values: grit, determination, courage, overcoming tremendous obstacles and loyalty doing battle against naysayers, the psychobabble of the day and the abuse done by those who spout it. Sound like anything you read or hear about these days?
Those on the right celebrate achievement and perseverance over obstacles without asking for a handout. Those with their hands out on the left don’t. “Love and Mercy” showcases what we celebrate while shaming much of what the left likes to pass off as the solution to problems: an over-medicated knuckling under to ugly controlling forces that inhibit the ability to create and produce all the while crony-profiting off of it.
Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys worked for what they got despite a large bevy of nasty and sometimes violent hangers-on and leeches who did their level best to tear them down.
I’ll admit an affinity for The Beach Boys. I saw them in concert in 1964, where they headlined a bill that also featured Gary Lewis and the Playboys (a cookie for anyone who remembers them and who knows to whom Gary Lewis is related). For over 50 years, Beach Boys music has been high up on my 45rpm/LP/8-Track/Cassette/CD/iPod playlists. When some in the mid-60s abandoned them in favor of a coterie of British Invasion-groups whose names and music are long since forgotten, I hung in by listening and wearing their look of Madras shirts, skinny white jeans and Keds without socks. Surf’s up!
In those days, every American teenage boy no matter where he lived wanted to go on a “Surfin’ Safari” in his “Little Deuce Coupe” to get some “Good Vibrations,” even if he could only do it “In My Room.” Every girl wanted to be a “Surfer Girl,” one of those “California Girls” whose boyfriend drove a souped-up “409” that always “Shutdown” the competition “All Summer Long.” Life was as sweet as “Wild Honey,” and both knew it was “Fun, Fun, Fun” because they had “The Warmth of the Sun” as they looked forward to growing up because, “Don’t Worry Baby” and “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t it be Nice”? “Scratch it Carl – scratch it!”
Instead of the usual bio-pic that looks at a life from the outside in, ‘Love and Mercy’ immerses you into the lives and heads of the characters, most notably Wilson, to where you’re looking from the inside out. And because of an almost free-form script by screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner and near-documentary style directing by Bill Pohlad – sometimes I didn’t know if I was watching the “L&M” cast or an original Beach Boys music video – it does a superb job of presenting the art of making art in an unvarnished and real way. It was as if I was sitting in on the sessions, most in a surprisingly cramped studio, listening to arrangement changes, improvisations and crosstalk between and among musicians, engineers in the booth, Wilson and others.
No it’s-a-crazy-idea-but-it-just-might-work clichés followed by over-the-shoulder scenes of a composer at a piano followed by scenes of the orchestra or band performing a finished work. It’s Brian Wilson’s anguish (foreshadowing his later and well-known mental illness), artistic tension, a collaborative process and him almost literally shedding blood to birth his music much the same way a mother births a child.
Much criticism has been leveled at the split-casting of Paul Dano as the younger Wilson and John Cusack as an older incarnation, but it works since whatever superficial distractions there are — passing physical resemblance — quickly disappear through their excellent performances. Best I’ve ever seen Cusack.
Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter, Wilson’s eventual second wife, gives an understated performance as a woman open to his eccentricities, compassionate to a fault and having the courage of her convictions to care enough to do the right thing even under tremendous pressure from as nasty a film villain as you’ll ever see in psychotherapist and Wilson-abuser, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti).
SPOILER ALERT: After one scene featuring the three of them and a hamburger, which was as psychologically terrifying and upsetting as anything you’ll ever see in a movie, I won’t be able to see Giamatti ever again without wanting to punch him in the nose.
Much screen time is devoted Wilson working his musical magic. Long scenes show him struggling to put on paper and then have studio musicians play the sounds he hears in his head brilliantly allow the viewer to witness how perilous the line is between genius and insanity.
And there’s plenty of his insanity, too. Squirmingly disturbing scenes of him hearing demonic voices in his head and from those whose job it was to either raise him or cure him, neither of which they did, show a hellishly tormented young and then middle-aged man. Under pressures like his, who wouldn’t self-medicate with booze, pills, coke, eating and months on end in bed?
Speaking of studio musicians, instead of a bunch of goofy long-haired rockers, you see as session players serious, conservatory-trained artists, many with skinny black neck ties and bald heads, working in collaborative harmony with an inspirational leader who they clearly respect, admire and near-worship.
Not mentioned in the film is the fact that Glen Campbell, the noted country-pop singer of the 70s and 80s was a frequent contributor to Wilson-produced studio sessions in those days. These guys were first-class talents and craftsmen.
There is tension between the visionary, Wilson, and his more commercially-oriented fellow-Beach Boy and cousin, Mike Love (Jake Abel), who is portrayed perhaps more harshly than he deserves since he has a point that unless you make a buck making art there are no bucks to make your art.
Despite the commercial failure of Wilson’s early innovative venture, the now universally regarded, iconic album, “Pet Sounds” with “God Only Knows,” one of the greatest pop tunes ever recorded, the Mike Love-grain of sand in the Brian Wilson-oyster resulted in the pearl of “Good Vibrations,” the top-rated Beach Boys tune of all time.
‘L&M’ is a unique film, which explains why some find it boring. It takes a brain to understand and appreciate art. When you see it for the first time, don’t expect the usual, but be prepared to be unnerved. At two hours, it takes a lot of energy to watch it, and you leave the theater drained but hoping that maybe there would be one more tune.
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The Wilson Brothers were victims of an abusive tyrant of a father in Murry Wilson. He was an evil, manipulative human being.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DATadl9seGc&sns=em