Love & Mercy—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

Love & Mercy. Released: June 2015. Runtime: 121 mins. Rated: PG-13 for thematic elements, drug content and language.

The biopic, a film version of the life of a person of note, has always been a popular genre. Seldom, however, has a biopic dealing with a creative person—an artist, writer, composer—delved into the actual process by which that creative person creates. Too often the work of a writer has been depicted simply by showing him or her tearing a page out of a typewriter, crumpling it and throwing it away. . Or a painter views something, makes some dabs on a canvas, and then there's a cut to the completed picture. Or a composer hums a few snatches of something, and suddenly a whole orchestra is playing it.

This approach to the biopic may be starting to change, however. Last year Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner detailed the hard work that J.M.W. Turner engaged in to create his masterly paintings. Now director Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy (the title of a Brian Wilson song) takes us often inside the recording studio where Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys, struggles to bring his innovative auditory “visions” to rhythmic reality. The film makes the tedious process of going over and over something to get it right, and the arguments among bandmates over technique, exciting. Perhaps Love & Mercy could be called a “processpic” as well as a biopic. 

The film's own structure is quite creative. It alternates between Brian Wilson's life in the 1960s, when the Beach Boys were one of the most popular of pop groups, but a time when Brian was beginning to have mental problems, and his life in the 1985-1992 period, when he was, seemingly, a beaten man, mentally ill and dominated by a brutally controlling psychiatrist, Gene Landy (Paul Giamatti), as Brian had once been dominated by his brutally abusive father (Bill Camp).

The younger Brian is played—brilliantly--by Paul Dano. The older Brian is played by John Cusack, in another of the fine performances that he has been giving for the past 30 years. Matching the two male leads in excellence is Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter, a car salesperson, whom Brian meets in the 1980s and who becomes his girlfriend and helper in the struggle to escape from under Landy's heel and regain mental health.

The beauteous Banks has attracted attention at various points in her eclectic career—notably as Effie Trinkett in The Hunger Games films—but here her nuanced performance is so right rhat we almost forget how beautiful she is. Definitely deserving mention, too, is Bill Camp as Brian's father. His appearances are brief bit searingly memorable in their obnoxiousness. 

In its depiction of the anguish involved in mental illness, Love & Mercy matches, perhaps surpasses, 2001's A Beautiful Mind, the biopic about mathematician John Nash. Particularly striking is a scene at a dinner party in which the normal sound of utensils clicking against china becomes for Brian an overwhelming and terrifying noise.

Love & Mercy shows the pain and suffering that some of those who celebrate “fun, fun, fun,” as the Beach Boys did so well, undergo in their own lives. But it also shows the “good vibrations” that true love and mercy can bring if one is lucky enough to encounter them, as Brian Wilson finally did.