by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night I
screened Charles Love & Mercy, a biopic of Brian Wilson, founder of the Beach Boys, whose bizarre
career trajectory from brilliant young genius to drug-induced psychotic to
puppet of his controversial therapist Dr. Eugene Landy to his ultimate
separation, full recovery and late-in-life comeback as a sort of elder
statesman of music would seem to be made for the big screen. I’m familiar with
the story from a lot of sources, including the reports that came out about it
when it was still going on as well as Steven Gaines’ 1980’s biography of the
Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains (which also dealt with Brian’s brother Dennis Wilson and his
relationship with Charles Manson, who was hoping Dennis would get him a record
contract so he could make the album that he thought would spark an apocalyptic
race war — when he didn’t get signed he targeted the man whom he’d thought
would sign him — Terry Melcher of Columbia Records, Doris Day’s son — by
ordering the killings of Sharon Tate and four other people who were staying at
the home Melcher had formerly occupied, and which Manson thought Melcher owned)
and Brian Wilson’s own autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, published in 1992. (Wouldn’t It Be Nice credits a co-writer, Todd Gold, and the Wikipedia
page on Brian Wilson says that in a 1992 lawsuit Brian said he never even read
the finished book; it also claims he’s working on another ghost-written “autobiography.”) The film picks up
Brian Wilson’s story when he’s in the middle of recording the backing tracks
for the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, Pet Sounds — a commercial disappointment (though not, as
depicted in the movie, an outright flop; it did break three AM radio hit singles) — under the
arrangement Brian worked out with his bandmates by which he would remain at
home, write songs and record backing tracks while the rest of the Beach Boys
toured. (Brian actually stopped touring with the Beach Boys a year and a half
before Pet Sounds was recorded, but it’s not
terribly surprising that screenwriters Oren Moyerman and Michael Alan Lerner —
who, ironically, shares two-thirds of his name with another legendary
songwriter — did this elementary bit of telescoping.)
The film accurately
depicts the arguments Brian got into with the other Beach Boys — especially his
cousin Mike Love — over his new material, with Mike arguing that the Beach Boys
had hit on a successful formula with songs about surfing, fast cars, California
sunshine and young love, and they shouldn’t leave their audience behind by
changing their style. Brian counter-argued that the audience was leaving them; he’d heard the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul and realized that the future of music was in
elaborate productions and sophisticated lyrics, and he was competitive enough
to want to make an album that would top Rubber Soul. An awful lot of people thought Pet Sounds had topped the Beatles — and one of them was Paul
McCartney, who went back into the studio determined to make an album that would
top the Beach Boys’ masterwork. The Beatles next released Revolver, and Brian heard it and was determined to top it,
so he hooked up with producer, songwriter and lyricist Van Dyke Parks to create
the most famous stillborn album in history, Smile (whose title became such a byword for recording
projects that fell flat due to their own overambitiousness that Charles Mingus’
Epitaph, a piece he premiered at
New York’s Town Hall in 1962 and which was in such a state of incompletion that
Mingus had copyists backstage writing the parts for part two while the band was
onstage playing part one — as “Mingus’ Smile”).
When he’s stuck a “friend” offers Brian LSD, he
goes on a trip and tells his then-wife Marilyn Rovell that he’s just seen God —
according to Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Brian actually took LSD two years earlier than that, just before
recording “California Girls,” and though lyrically it’s an old-fashioned Beach
Boys song, the shimmer in the musical arrangement was a direct result of
Brian’s LSD use — at least that’s how Brian told the story a quarter-century
ago in a book whose “take” on much of Brian’s life was very different from what
he thinks about it now (the closing credits of Love and Mercy credit him with cooperating with the project). The
film intercuts between Brian Wilson in the late 1980’s as he meets and falls in
love with ex-model turned Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth
Banks) and Brian in the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s as he gets more and more
obsessive about Smile, then
suddenly abandons the project (according to Steven Gaines, he had another meeting
with Paul McCartney, who came out to California with a tape of the Beatles’
song “A Day in the Life,” and Brian’s face drained white as he realized that
the Beatles had already accomplished everything he’d hoped to do with Smile; Brian’s own account in Wouldn’t It Be Nice was that he heard Paul play “She’s Leaving Home”
but somehow it doesn’t seem to me that a live vocal-and-piano performance of
one of the least “psychedelic” songs on Sgt. Pepper would have had the huge ego-destroying effect on
Brian Wilson as hearing “A Day in the Life” in the form we know it from the
recording, and the writers of Love and Mercy seem to attribute the abandonment of Smile to yet another argument between Brian and his
father, Murry Wilson, with whom he had a relationship similar to Leopold and
Wolfgang Mozart: the mediocre musician who realized he’d sired a genius and
tried to exploit him), retreats to his bed and hardly ever leaves for two,
three or four years (the accounts differ) except to get food from the refrigerator
and (presumably) use the bathroom.
His weight balloons to nearly 300 pounds and
Marilyn decides to act, first by putting a padlock on the refrigerator door and
then calling in Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who had developed a system of
treating celebrity patients by taking over their lives 24/7, surrounding them
with minders and bodyguards (when the movie Brian first meets Melinda at the
car dealership where she works, he points out his “bodyguard” and muses on how
odd a word that is) and gives Brian the full-dress treatment. By 1976 Brian is
well enough that Warner Bros., which then had the Beach Boys under contract,
mounts a full-dress “Brian Is Back!” campaign, including starring the Beach
Boys in an NBC-TV special and booking Brian Wilson on Saturday Night Live, in which he performs a version of “Good
Vibrations” with just his voice and piano, the piano mounted in a giant
sandbox. The real Brian Wilson had done this in one of his crazier inspirations
— he said he would be inspired if he could feel sand under his feet as he
composed — only the giant sandbox ended up being a giant litter box for Brian’s
pets (he had cats, though in the movie we see only dogs). When Brian wrote Wouldn’t
It Be Nice he was still under Landy’s
influence — he’d flown the coop in the late 1970’s, then been arrested as a
homeless derelict in San Diego and taken to a hospital, where he recalled being
treated by a Black nurse who jacked him off (not that that was going to end up in the movie — they had a
PG-13 rating to protect!), and Landy came back slamming into his life and put
him on an even tighter regimen of control than he had before. Wouldn’t It Be
Nice depicts Dr. Landy as the
angel of mercy who saved Brian Wilson’s life and nursed him back to creativity
— at the end of the book Brian describes the lawsuit the other Beach Boys filed
against him and Dr. Landy, demanding that Brian fire Landy as a condition of
being allowed to remain in the Beach Boys, and it ends with him, feeling
betrayed and hurt, facing an uncertain future without Dr. Landy’s influence. I
remember this vividly because Brian was scheduled to do a book signing in San
Diego and I was supposed to cover the event for a small local weekly — only at
the last minute Dr. Landy insisted that the event be canceled, and it was.
Love
and Mercy describes Dr. Landy as so
domineering he’s practically insane himself; when he decides Melinda is getting
too close to Brian and it’s threatening his control, he insists she not see him
again (he’d previously ordered Brian to cut off all contact with his ex-wife
Marilyn and their two daughters), and the lawsuit that forced Landy out of
Brian’s life is depicted not as a betrayal but a liberation. Yet, ironically,
the movie is titled after — and ends with a performance of — “Love and Mercy,”
the first song on the 1989 Brian Wilson solo album Dr. Landy produced, even
though the one scene we see from the recording of this album shows Dr. Landy
browbeating Brian in his home studio and demanding he write a song … at once, in a scene that makes a powerful but not
overstated parallel between the way Dr. Landy is treating Brian and the way his
father treated him. (In Wouldn’t
It Be Nice Brian describes his deal
with Sire Records to release this album; his contract called for Sire to release
a second album if the first sold over a certain number of copies, and Brian
actually recorded the second album, with the revealing title Sweet Insanity, but Sire president Seymore Stein weaseled out of
his contractual obligation to release it because, while the first album had met
the sales quota, it had done so just barely.) The movie’s basic stratagem for
showing Brian Wilson at two different stages of his life is to use two actors
to play him — John Cusack as the late-1980’s Brian and Paul Dano as the
mid-1960’s Brian (I love Paul Dano as an actor but I’m having the feeling about
him I also had about Ryan Gosling: when is there going to be one casting director out there who casts him as
someone normal?) — though they both look
believable as the real person (the physical resemblances to the real Brian are
strong) and as the same person at
different ages. (This was a long-unrealized project of Josef von Sternberg: to
portray a character’s complete life story by using different actors to play him
or her at different ages.) There’s also a third Brian, since the film
occasionally flashes back to his and his brothers’ childhoods and in those the
son of the director, Bill Pohlad, plays Brian.
Love and Mercy inevitably leaves out a lot of the twists and
turns of the real-life story — I remember a mid-1990’s TV-movie about the Beach
Boys that took a much more
morbid view of the material (including Murry Wilson suffering a fatal heart
attack while listening to Lawrence Welk’s recording of “Two Step Side-Step,”
the one Murry Wilson song actually recorded before the Beach Boys became
successful, with his record player on repeat so the song plays over and over) —
but on its own terms it’s a quite moving story, well told, and with the blue of
the Southern California sky (at least when it isn’t smoggy!) and sea dominating
the color scheme instead of everything being shoehorned into the dank
green-and-brown look that constitutes virtually all of the spectrum we get to
see in most color films today. One particularly subtle scene in the
Moverman-Lerner script comes when Brian’s first wife Marilyn comes out of their
house to his redoubt near the swimming pool to tell him he should come in
because their daughter has just smiled her first smile — and Brian, so
paralyzed with trauma over the collapse of his stillborn album, stays
motionless because he can’t bear even to hear the word “smile.” It’s also well acted, with both Cusack
and Dano standing out — though I suspect much of the music comes from the
surviving session tapes of both Pet Sounds and Smile (both of which have been
issued in multi-CD boxed sets for the true Beach Boys fanatic) and I believe
many of the session directions we hear come from the real Brian Wilson — Cusack in particular manages to
project just enough twitchiness we get the impression the character is not “all
there,” as the saying goes, without making him too floridly crazy. And
Elizabeth Banks matches the men in portraying a character whose love of Brian
triumphs over her fear of him (and of Dr. Landy — the final credits feature
some where-are-they-now titles that make clear the filmmakers’ view of her as
the savior that got Brian out from under Dr. Landy’s thumb and set him on the
path to sanity and functionality as both person and musician).
