Biopics, especially musical biopics, have to face a challenge. How on Earth are they going to interest and engross the audience in the genius of its main character with more than simply reenacting some key events in that person's life? How do they explain and depict the creative or revolutionary force that has come so far as to inspire an entire movie? Well, I don't know, I'm but a lowly internet critic but plenty of people in the movie business have tried their hand at it. Add to that list Bill Pohlad with Love & Mercy, his biopic of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.
The film is split into two parts, one depicting the young Brian Wilson during the production of The Beach Boys's masterpiece "Pet Sounds" in the 60s, the other showing him as a heavily drug infused wreck of a person during the 80s. In the early days he is portrayed by Paul Dano, an actor I feel mostly indifferent about even though he's been the co-star in one of my favorite movies, There Will Be Blood. Here he does a pretty good job, alternating between maniacally pursuing his creative instincts in the recording booth and dealing with his psychological problems in private. In the later days Wilson is played by John Cusack as an awkward shell of a man completely dependent on his therapist Gene Landy, played by Paul Giamatti. In this timeline he has a romance with car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter, played by Elizabeth Banks, which Landy is trying to break up.
While I am not opposed to having these two narratives in the film there simply doesn't seem to be a necessity for it either. The film keeps jumping between the two but they never intertwine or go hand in hand. It's more lazy in its approach, almost as if the filmmakers get bored with one story line and jump to the other one to regain some momentum. Sure, you can say that the Dano narrative is important to underline what a tortured genius Wilson was in his young days. But this simply leads to the realization that there's no real drama going on in that timeline. Just being a genius doesn't make for a compelling narrative. What it has instead are a bunch of tired cliches from the musical biopic handbook. Abusive father? Check! Drugs? Check! Generic montages in the studio? Check! It also doesn't help that Dano plays the only fully fledged character while the rest of them, his brothers, his family, his friends, are all flat cardboard cutouts.
But how about the 80s timeline with Cusack? Luckily here we actually have something to be invested in. The love story between Banks and Cusack is surprisingly sincere and you root for her all the way to get him out of Giamatti's clutches. It's a nice reversal of the age-old formula because in Love & Mercy the princess has to save the prince from the dragon. What is really bothersome about it, though, is the fact that it's all very simple drama, very black and white. Giamatti cranks it up to 11 and we never doubt that he is the tyrannical, sexist and power hungry therapist he seems to be. I guess you can call it a missed chance by director Bill Pohlad and writers Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner to explore that conflict a little more. How did Wilson become dependent on Landy? Why was Landy made legal guardian of Wilson? Is there any shred of humanity left in Landy? Expect to be disappointed if you're asking yourself these questions during the film.
So apart from the outstanding soundtrack, and good acting from Paul Dano and Elizabeth Banks, there's really not much else to make Love & Mercy stand out in the formulaic world of biopics. It's inoffensive, easily digestible and sadly, at least for me, mostly generic.
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