This film deepens that appreciation and illuminates its sources. Melinda is the only person who can love and appreciate Brian for who he is, and as such she is the stand-in for the rest of us, who admire what he accomplished.
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Banks’s astute performance, in a series of eye-catching period-appropriate outfits, is what binds the film together. Melinda, whose sunny disposition masks a steely, icy resolve, makes a very satisfying foil, and Ms.
Giamatti’s smile will give you nightmares, as will his hair) and a recognizable type of villain. A jolly, friendly fellow on the surface, Landy is both a one-of-a-kind creep (Mr. Told almost entirely from Melinda’s perspective, it follows her discovery of the hidden, sinister dimensions of Dr. If the ’60s half of “Love & Mercy” is, in part, a trippy excursion into a golden piece of the California past, the ’80s section is a spooky Los Angeles noir. Their rise, chronicled in a lively montage of early hits, was overseen by Murry Wilson (Bill Camp), an abusive patriarch who hung around to undermine and humiliate his sons, Brian in particular, even after being fired as the group’s manager. The Beach Boys were a family business, including Brian’s brothers Carl (Brett Davern) and Dennis (Kenny Wormald) and their cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel). Dano, gentle and inscrutable as a panda bear, conveys the pathos of a young man’s unraveling. Dano create a remarkable composite performance, a set of before-and-after pictures that is also a perfectly unified, hauntingly complex portrait. Working together - but also in isolation from each other, like musicians in separate recording booths - Mr. Their courtship is complicated by the presence of Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a psychologist who serves as Brian’s guru, dietitian and legal guardian. Instead of telling the story in full, the film shifts back and forth - fluidly and seamlessly - from the ’60s to the ’80s, when Brian, now played by John Cusack, first meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), in a Cadillac showroom in Los Angeles.
The making of “Pet Sounds” is the centerpiece of “Love & Mercy.” It also represents a plateau of calm and control in the midst of a life full of chaos and pain. He is freer and more confident than ever before, layering and sculpting improbable instruments and bewitching harmonies into songs that are at once exquisitely simple and astonishingly sophisticated. Watching Brian, with his boyish face and eager puppy-dog manner, adjusting the knobs and directing the session players, is like watching a kid in a toy store. The attention to detail in these scenes provides a feast for geeks of all kinds, as the camera lovingly ogles microphones, amplifiers and consoles that were state of the art in the mid-1960s. We might see our idol, more or less persuasively impersonated by a hard-working actor, strumming a guitar or noodling at a piano, but the complicated labor of creativity is notoriously hard to show on screen.
What is often missing from the formula is any real insight into the reason we might be interested in the first place, which is the music.
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On screen, the lives of musicians tend to follow a tried-and-true outline: A rise to fame is followed by a personal and professional crisis, often involving drugs, which is followed by a redemptive third act. It’s a loving tribute to the Beach Boys and the man responsible for their distinctive sound, but it goes to deeper and stranger places than most movies of its kind. It’s a startling image, and it holds out a twofold promise: that the film will take viewers inside its protagonist’s head and that it will pay particular attention to the role that sound played in his life.įor the most part, this movie, a smart, compassionate, refreshingly unconventional biopic directed by Bill Pohlad, makes good on both promises, exploring the mental world and the artistic method of a great artist. The first thing you see in “ Love & Mercy” is an extreme close-up of Brian Wilson’s ear.
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