Brian Wilson is bugging out. Sitting in the swimming pool of his California mansion (played by Paul Dano in the recent biopic Love & Mercy), the songwriting Beach Boy is convinced that Phil Spector is wiretapping his home; he wants to tell the other Beach Boys about his plans for the upcoming album, “SMiLE,” but he needs them to come closer — to the deep end of the pool — so he can whisper to them.
“We can’t come to the deep end, Brian,” says the actor playing his brother Carl. “We’re too shallow.”
So goes the life of Brian Wilson, visionary creator of the Beach Boys’ hits and their most ambitious work — stuff like “Pet Sounds” and the ill-fated “SMiLE” which remained unfinished for 30 years, shelved due to the songwriter’s crippling fears and mental issues.
It also remained unreleased because the Beach Boys — particularly cousin Mike Love — feared it was commercial suicide for a band that specialized in songs about girls, beaches and hotrods. Like the song goes, Brian’s musical ideas “just weren’t made for these times.”
In Love & Mercy, director Bill Pohlad takes you a little further into Wilson’s mind than you might want to venture. It’s a place of beautiful melodies and harmonies, but also disturbing voices and sadistic father figures. Being a Gemini, what better way to represent the two-part story — one half told in 1966, the other half 20 years later — than by having two actors portray Wilson? Dano does a scarily effective job in capturing Wilson’s youthful wonderment and manic glee, not to mention his neurotic fears and demons; John Cusack picks up the thread two decades later, long after the main Beach Boy has semi-retired from songwriting and performing — he’s become a recluse, mostly, lying in bed for three years, eating steaks and junk food. A shell of a person, his life is now controlled by a Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) who has convinced the fear-ridden Wilson to assign him as his legal guardian. This doesn’t sit well with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a sympathetic blonde Cadillac saleswoman who wants Brian to stand up for himself and cut Landy loose.
All this is based on the true-life struggles of Wilson to regain something like an autonomous life, after decades of cranking out hit songs under the bullying hand of his stage father, Murray Wilson; not to mention the dismissive influence of Mike Love, who shredded what was left of Brian Wilson’s ego for daring to stray outside the Beach Boys’ surfing/girls/summer formula. And there was also the pop-buying public that largely turned away from the “square” Beach Boys in favor of more hippie-flavored fare by the late ‘60s.
No wonder Brian Wilson decided to go away for a little while.
In Love & Mercy, it’s Dano who does the heavy lifting, showing us Wilson coming apart at the seams — hearing bad voices in his head, disappearing into the endless labyrinth of “SMiLE,” retreating to his mansion and junk food. But Cusack is also effective at capturing Wilson’s grown-up fears — the difficulty of connecting with a new person in his life, the endlessly understanding Banks. He’s spooked and mumbling, cloying and vulnerable. It’s only Giamatti who strikes an unnecessarily over-the-top note as the controlling shrink Landy. (In one scene he pops up in the control booth behind Brian and Melinda, exactly like a Halloween sequel or some other shlocky horror movie.)
The film, too, gets almost Kubrickian in one sequence where Wilson views himself at various ages, lying on the bed of his sunny, white-walled mansion: it’s like the “ages of man” bit of 2001, minus the Star Child.
It’s an unusual approach, having the pop music genius played by two actors who look nothing alike (arguably, Cusack looks not at all like the older Wilson; someone like Jeff Bridges about 15 years ago would have been a better match). But director Pohlad had screenwriter Oren Moverman onboard, the guy who wrote Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There. That film famously sliced Dylan’s life into six segments, with six actors (Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett among them) playing the iconic singer/songwriter.
Is there a word for a personality split six different ways? Well, with Brian Wilson it was a bit easier: the Gemini is the sign of “the twins.” Like Dylan, Wilson’s life was bisected by fan expectations and personal growth. Dylan may have hid his true intentions behind protest music until Like A Rolling Stone allowed him to rock, just as Wilson hid his ambitions behind surf guitar and innocent lyrics. Both drew waves of flak for moving off the reservation.
Love & Mercy captures that juncture, as Brian (Dano) buckles under fears of flying and performing, and retreats to Los Angeles studios to create the backing tracks for “Pet Sounds” sans his bandmates (recruiting the stealth weapon of LA’s Wrecking Crew as his studio band). He previews the new tracks — dripping with vulnerability — to band members; Mike Love accuses Wilson of writing a “drug song” with Hang on to Your Ego (later renamed I Know There’s an Answer). For the squeaky-clean Beach Boys image, “Pet Sounds” seemed too far out.
Highlights include scenes of Dano “playing” the studio, instructing his Wrecking Crew to bring in cellos here, invert the bass line there. That such albums were created almost live, or on four-track recording technology, is amazing. Also amazing is that Wilson was deaf in one ear — the result, it’s hinted, of a beating from his father at an early age. It’s the reason early Beach Boys records were released in mono: so Brian could hear them properly through a car radio.
Of course, Beach Boys music in general also tends to divide ears. It’s hard to convince some people of the band’s greatness. All they hear is the surf songs, the falsetto harmonies, Mike Love’s annoying nasal bray; they see the band as an oldies act, which indeed the remaining torchbearers are (all the Wilson boys are dead now, save for Brian). They don’t factor in what a strange slide into eccentric pop and chamber chorale weirdness the band’s music took from 1966 onwards. They just hear Kokomo, and think of Tom Cruise flipping bottles in Cocktail.
It’s worth noting too that “Pet Sounds,” nearly 50 years after its release, still divides listeners. Some people revere it as a masterpiece; some find the vibe obnoxiously twee. Some acknowledge the album’s brilliant songs — stuff like Wouldn’t It Be Nice and God Only Knows, which have found their way onto every retro movie soundtrack in the past 20 years — while still holding back from accepting the Beach Boys. You know: that band of shaggy 60-year-olds still singing about surfing and hotrods. Some find Brian Wilson to be a kook, an eccentric; others paint him as an unassailable genius.
Love & Mercy, if anything, is bitin, stopping before Wilson’s final vindication: confronting those unreleased “SMiLE” tracks, going back to the studio and finishing the album in 2004. By then, it all made a bit more sense.