Bill Pohlad’s Love and Mercy creeps into the ears of a musician, and intently takes up residence there through its entire two-hour running-time. Diametrically opposed to the kind of linear chronologies and melodramatic beating typical of the musical biopic, there’s an audacity to its methods: the film draws its structure from sounds and ideas rather than events and characters. It’s a fitting shake-up, then, as a tribute to The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Sensitive, strange and inexplicably melodic, Love and Mercy does right by its subject, and charts bold new territory in the cinematic exploration of music and impulse.
With the original music on-hand and an unusual conceit to play around with, Pohlad’s vision bristles with authenticity and perspective. His filmic treatment of the eccentric rock legend swivels between two timelines, with Paul Dano playing Wilson through the making of the famed album Pet Sounds in the 1960s and John Cusack taking over when the action flashes forward to the ‘80s, during which Wilson meets and courts his future wife, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks). The two stories work in tandem with one another, but only so far as our understanding of Wilson is concerned. Love and Mercy is too predisposed with getting to the heart of its subject to dabble in more abstract thematic territory. It’s a fruitful approach, however, and the evocation is fuller and more probing than you might expect.
Dano and Cusack inform each other’s performances to an astonishing degree. It’s as if you can’t imagine Wilson one way or the other; as the film progresses, each actor deepens the other’s performance to create a resolutely complex character study. We open on Dano projecting a tenderness and a disarming sense of isolation. His enormously sympathetic portrait feeds perfectly into Cusack’s, who’s tasked with playing Wilson in his later, more tumultuous years. Together, their choices fuse into a singular understanding of the character, and oftentimes, the symmetry of their performances is utterly fascinating. There emerges an emotional throughline in watching Dano’s Wilson, living in the shadow of his father, alongside Cusack’s, as he succumbs to the tyrannical demands of his “legal” guardian, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Similarly, the relationship between Wilson’s ears for music and his diagnosed schizophrenia conflates in powerful and surprising ways.
The film’s potential is realized best in Dano’s half of the movie. Here, Pohlad delves into Wilson’s creative process with the goal of illuminating his inner truth, the key being that plot points don’t dictate the story’s progression. Not only does he achieve his goal, but the director -- helming a film for the first time in 25 years -- almost inverts the traditional approach. The narrative glides from song to song, and moment to moment. There’s a construct, to be sure, but there’s no expository dialogue or climactic set of events to lay it out. It’s going from “God Only Knows” to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” observing with apparent precision how such eclectic melodies and increasingly dark sensibilities transferred from Wilson’s head to the recording studio. Instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, there’s a story being told. Pohlad allows you to bask in the music, relating its words and moods to Dano’s -- and eventually Cusack’s -- embodiment. Such scenes in the studio are shot by Robert Yeoman (Wes Anderson’s regular) like raw footage of a documentary, catching glimpses of Wilson in and out of his element, conducting the composition before shutting down at a moment’s notice. With the music -- added contributions come from the great Atticus Ross -- sweeping you along, the effect is almost surreal. It’s a textured contention with an artist at work, like one I’ve never quite experienced.
The extent to which Pohlad stays in the background is similarly impressive. For such an ambitious and exacting approach, you never feel his hand overpowering the proceedings. With Yeoman in tow, I expected something more richly cinematic, perhaps even dreamlike, to match the surreal nature of the film’s content. But what’s provided, instead, is something verging on verité; the camera moves swiftly and captures isolated moments of beauty, but it’s all keeping within Wilson’s erratic point-of-view. There’s a lot of trickery going on here, but the trust in naturalism allows it all to meld easily.
Things are less successful on Cusack’s side of things, even if the actor is no less brilliant than his younger half. As a film like Big Eyes illustrated to a far more dramatic degree -- mainly, with the psychopath that was Christoph Waltz’s Walter Keane -- the stranger-than-fiction nature of some historical stories can actually bog down their cinematic treatments. If you’re familiar with the abusive fraud that was Dr. Landy, and the ways in which he nearly killed Wilson through his “treatment,” then you probably know where the story is headed once he testily introduces himself to Melinda. The romantics between Wilson and Melinda are situated beautifully within the film’s whole, aiding in our understanding of Wilson and also providing a point-of-view -- Melinda’s -- different from the rest of the film. Again, the generosity and sweetness of Love and Mercy feels just right as an ode to Wilson, as does its averseness to convention.
But increasingly, Landy overwhelms this half of the story. You sense Pohlad losing control to history, struggling to explore Wilson in his relationship to Melinda -- and as an older, more lonely man -- without ceding to his protagonist’s extraordinary story of entrapment. For a decent stretch somewhere in the film’s second half, the movie plays like a disturbing psychological thriller, with Melinda trying to free Wilson from Landy’s clutches and Landy edging closer and closer to pure evil. Banks is very good here, and she holds her own against an excessively-committed Giamatti. (That’s saying something.) But at a certain point, the tete-a-tete between Melinda and Landy feels not only beside the point, but distracting and dominating. For a film with such a measured sense of flow, the saga of Landy’s abusiveness is rendered a jarring outlier.
That doesn’t take away from what Pohlad accomplishes in aggregate, though. Love and Mercy thrives in its defiance, its humanity and its curiosity, and ultimately succeeds as a sensory exploration of Wilson the man and Wilson the artist. Even its main flaw contributes to the magnetic sense of the unusual.
Pohlad’s end montage is, in the best way, disorienting and challenging. Like a psychedelic-fueled mosaic, it cuts rapidly between Cusack and Dano, holding Wilson in discomfiting positions and in eerie sounds through time. Pohlad fuses the two sides of the man -- the crazy voices and the harmonious ones, the juvenile husband and the hapless ol’ romantic -- to reach his grand conclusion. It stuns in its genuineness: by Love and Mercy’s end, there’s a depth to the film that not only feels earned, but discovered. It’s the discovery of an artist, not through facts or details but through an engagement with his music -- with what he was always trying to say.
Pohlad takes one, last step back. Hauntingly, beautifully, mystically, the music filters in for a final time, guiding us to that decisive cut-to-black. Echoing over images of himself, young and old, we hear Wilson sing, “These things I’ll be until I die.” There’s the discovery. It’s what he was always trying to say.
Grade: A-