![]() ![]() As these sounds rise to a crescendo, Wilson stands up, yells, and jets out of the room. Though many would simply tune out the clacks and clings of metal hitting china, Wilson can’t help but hear them form a steely cacophony. In a scene in the biopic Love & Mercy, directed by Bill Pohlad, a young Wilson (Paul Dano) fixates on the sound of silverware scraping at dinner plates during a celebratory meal following the successful release of “Good Vibrations”. But while his skill in complex harmonies and sophisticated arrangements is beyond reproach, his ear is attuned to things more fundamental than the playbook of ’60s pop. As the widely-recognized artistic genius at the heart of the Beach Boys, Wilson’s preoccupation with perfect pop is extensively documented. Some might prefer the word “music” to end that last sentence, and they of course wouldn’t be wrong. It’s an eloquent tribute to a great American innovator.- The Beach Boys, “Surf’s Up” (from The SMiLE Sessions)īrian Wilson is a man obsessed with sound. Love & Mercy makes me think it would be interesting to see a British movie about Pink Floyd’s lost genius Syd Barrett, maybe on these lines, maybe not. However, this would have been to rob the movie of some of its flavour and its hum of strangeness and alienation. But there are moments when I was philistine enough to wonder if the second half couldn’t simply have been played by Dano as well. The two-actor approach is a shrewd way of conveying the dislocation and disconnection suffered by Wilson and by those who knew and worked with him: many forced out of his life by fate or professional duplicity. This is a picture of someone who has become alienated from his own talent: the creativity and expression have gone, leaving him only with the sadness and the overwork and the oppressive claustrophobia – for which the studio is a horribly potent image: the musician working in airless vacuum while the controllers sit noiselessly behind glass. It is all a high-functioning delusion, created by a drug cocktail. His tics and mannerisms are typically and recognisably Cusack-ish, though he interestingly portrays a man who has only notionally got his act together, having lost weight and recommenced work, but presenting a waxy, doughy, tormented face to the world. Photograph: Francois DuhamelĬusack is marginally less good as Brian. John Cusack as the older Brian Wilson and Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter. This is the woman who is to rescue Wilson. ![]() Wilson comes into a Cadillac dealership one afternoon and falls in love with the woman selling him a car – Melinda Ledbetter, a smart, controlled performance from Elizabeth Banks. John Cusack plays the later Wilson, an unhappy, zombiefied and sedated man under the thumb of his controlling manager, Dr Eugene Landy, played – perhaps a little by the villain rulebook – by Paul Giamatti. A wild man trapped in the body of a male frump. He finds new dimensions to his genius for choral harmony: Brian is his own George Martin, but the band do not support him and loneliness, drug use and mental instability take their toll.ĭano is brilliant as Wilson, a career-best for him: his deceptively blank, bland, open face and disconcertingly quiet speaking voice are put to great use, sympathetically recreating Wilson’s gentleness, persistence and suppressed agony – his moon-like features framed by a pudding-bowl haircut that grew out, not into wild hippyish tresses, but an unflattering mop. He develops bold new orchestrations and arrangements, new sound textures of an analogue era that to the modern taste might sound more like inspired folk or world-music creations. Wilson is then liberated, like so many of his musical generation, by refusing to play live and instead finding solace in the recording studio. Wilson is portrayed by Paul Dano and John Cusack, past and future Brians of the 60s and 80s, respectively descending into and emerging from mental breakdown either side of the great triumph-cum-disaster of Pet Sounds, that critically adored commercial disaster.ĭano is the puppyishly eager and square-looking younger Brian shown with the rest of the band in a witty Super-8-style sketch of the Beach Boys’ early years over the opening credits. The movie faces off two different Brians, played by two different actors: rather in the way Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) – co-written by Moverman – had a string of different people to play Bob Dylan. ![]()
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