The true story of the backbone of The Beach Boys is a raw and revealing look at mental illness.
Love and Mercy (Paul Dano, John Cusack, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti) – The Beach Boys was one of the sentinel bands of the rock era. Most rock fans know that The Beach Boys was a family affair, led by the Wilson brothers and including cousin Mike Love among others. At the heart of The Beach Boys was Brian Wilson, one of the inventors of the so-called California sound. The early Beach Boys music was all surf, sun, and California Girls like Barbara Ann. But as they evolved, so did the music, culminating in the earth-shaking album Pet Sounds. (which actually included actual pet sounds).
Brian Wilson was a genius – a troubled, mentally disturbed, brilliant, eclectic, drug-riddled prodigy. Love and Mercy, the title of a song Wilson wrote and recorded in 1988, is an unabashed look into the group and its leader. If not for the music, this film would be called dark and troubling. It resembles The Doors in that way.
He started as a willful boy trying to please his dominating and abusive father (who also served as the group’s producer) then morphs into a young man who constantly hears voices and sounds in his head that informs his music and drive him crazy, and eventually to a robot of a man buoyed by a cocktail of drugs just to function. Under the care and the thumb of a Svengali-like psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who exploited him for many years, Wilson meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a car salesman who finds him interesting and unique. She turns out to be his salvation but not before being threatened by Landy.
Paul Dano magnificently plays the young Wilson, capturing his brilliance, his obsessive devotion to innovation, and mercurial personality. John Cusack quietly plays the older Wilson, restrained by anti-anxiety and depression drugs and who knows what else. He is captivated by Melissa but isn’t exactly adept at social skills. He opens up to her and slowly begins to understand that the Wilson who created Pet Sounds still lurks somewhere deep in his drug-ravaged mind.
Banks soars as Ledbetter, her love oozing out from her perfectly appointed 1960s wardrobe. Giamatti is demonic as Dr. Landy, a complicated man who may have had good motives but couldn’t avoid taking advantage of his patient (somewhat like the portrait painted of Michael Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray).
The plot reveals the Wilson story as few of us know it. It is a story of one man’s love of music and the mercy needed for him to overcome his many demons.