IF you seek a soft-bodied film with comfortable dramatic values, “Love and Mercy” will not meet your need. Which is not to say that you should shun it.
Of all the songs by ‘60s band The Beach Boys, I have been aware only of “Good Vibrations” and “Sloop John B”, a tiny fraction of the 384 they recorded on more than 30 albums.
Bill Pohlad’s film tells how the group’s creative wizard Brian Wilson endured dreadful abuse by the unscrupulous psychiatrist Eugene Landy until the ‘80s when intervention by Melinda Ledbetter, to whom Wilson is now married, got that monkey off his back.
In a powerful story that radiates authenticity in its treatment of the minutiae of the lifestyle of five young men who became wealthy by making music that engaged the enthusiasm of a generation, Pohlad doesn’t gloss over discomforting passages.
The story moves between the 1960s, when Brian Wilson (Paul Dano) was writing the songs that brought the band its fame, and the 1980s, when Landy had taken possession of Wilson’s (John Cusack) mind, body, soul and musical skill.
Oren Moverman’s screenplay allows Pohlad to make seamless and credible time transitions between the two periods and provides Cusack with the film’s most dramatic discomfort. Discomfort indeed, but necessary to allow the conflict and its resolution to develop as faithfully on the screen as it did in reality.
Matching Cusack’s convincing portrayal are Elizabeth Banks as Melinda, emotionally scarified to the point at last of confronting Landy’s malevolent influence, and Paul Giamatti as Landy. In any film, Giamatti’s presence is a plus. In “Love and Mercy”, playing a despicable apology for a human being, he hits the mark again.
At Palace Electric
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