July 15, 2015
Page 9
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PHOTO BY
F RANCOIS D UHAMEL /R OADSTAR A TTRACTIONS
The Genius Who Powered the Beach Boys
‘Love and Mercy’ shows
O PINIONATED
singer’s darker side
J UDGE
D ARLEEN O RTEGA
An especially complex life story both deserves and
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of their subjects, and that too many writers and directors
lack the talent or will to tell a story that chooses its bits
wisely and leaves room for the subject’s essential mystery.
What I loved best about “Love and Mercy,” the new
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the Beach Boys, is that it felt true -- deeply, complexly
true, whether or not it is factually accurate -- yet also left
me convinced that I don’t and can’t know the whole sto-
ry of Brian Wilson’s life. There is mystery here, as there
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delves, and educates, and points you toward the mystery,
without pretending to solve it.
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get the essential facts right -- though you can skip this
paragraph if you’d prefer to be in suspense, as I genuinely
was. Wilson rose to success as a very young man, writing
music for and performing with the band made up of his
two brothers, a cousin, and a family friend. His excep-
tional abilities now seem particularly evident during the
period in the mid-1960s when he stopped touring with the
Beach Boys and focused on producing their 11th album,
“Pet Sounds,” which was an artistic departure into more
complex and melancholy territory and is now widely con-
sidered to be one of the best albums of its era. Wilson was
ahead of his time, however, and, burdened by a troubled
family history and by mental illness, he increasingly med-
BY
BY J UDGE
D ARLEEN O RTEGA
icated himself with alcohol and a variety of drugs, includ-
ing LSD. By the mid-70s he had sunk into a reclusive and
dissolute existence that nearly killed him.
He came out of that period largely through the assis-
tance of a psychologist, Eugene Landy, who assumed ty-
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his career. It was not until the late 1980s – when Wil-
son met the woman who eventually became his second
wife, Melinda Ledbetter -- that she and others eventually
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those events in an episodic fashion. Instead, director Bill
Pohlad cast two actors to play Wilson at two distinct pe-
riods in his dramatic life, and uses those two periods as
windows into his larger story.
Paul Dano does his best work yet as the younger Wil-
son, who heard beautifully inventive musical arrange-
ments in his head which he passionately brought to life
in the recording studio. The usual stage focus of most
music biopics wouldn’t have worked for Wilson, because
his genius was most evident in cramped studio spaces
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ing down the creative process into elements that help you
better understand the whole. We watch him directing
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down to assembling bobby pins inside a piano to elicit a
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paniment for “Carolyn, No.”
The particularity of Wilson’s intentions and his en-
thusiasm for the act of creation come through in Dano’s
scenes with mostly older studio musicians and at the piano
assembling the scaffolding of the wondrous “God Only
Knows.” It turns out that I knew this music too well to
know it at all -- these scenes made me hear it as though
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music I had not given the appreciation it deserves.
Those scenes of early Wilson also depict the incip-
ient signs of the breakdown to follow. Dano captures
Wilson’s vulnerability, the anguish of interactions with
his despotic father, his youthful ambition, the extent and
the limits of his ability to communicate his drive to cre-
ate sounds never heard before, how he exasperated and
frightened those close to him. The wistfulness and sor-
row underlying even buoyant songs like “Wouldn’t It Be
Nice?” make a different kind of sense in this context;
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wasn’t made for these times.”
Director Pohlad ‘s choice to intersperse these scenes
of early Wilson with scenes from 20 years later is such
a brilliant stroke that it is hard to imagine doing Wilson’s
story justice otherwise. Rather than attempting to chart
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complex countermelodies worthy of Wilson’s own com-
positions, humming with the tension of how the two ver-
sions of this man can be the same person. John Cusack
as the middle-aged Wilson doesn’t resemble Dano--and,
in a sense, neither did the middle-aged Wilson resemble
C ONTINUED ON P AGE 16