The Price Of Genius-The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s Love and Mercy

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Love and Mercy, starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, 2015

No question if you read enough stories about geniuses of all sorts from big-brained physicists like Newton and Einstein to big-be-bop musical guys like the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson who was the de facto impresario of that group you will find so very troubling stories along the way. That is the case here as Wilson’s tell all song from the 1980s when he was beginning to recover from his dark night got the nod as the title of the film, Love and Mercy. The film is a bit different from most biopics, especially of musicians since it concentrates, sometimes successfully at others in a confusing manner needing more detail, on two periods in Wilson’s life- the 1960s heyday of his biggest successes and height of his creative energies and the 1980s when he was fighting aided by the woman who would be his future wife, Melinda Ledbetter, to control his demons within.

Admittedly I was not a Beach Boys fan as a kid, found their music well too dishy when I was in thrall to blues and protest folk songs at a time when my true love rock and roll had turned to vanilla but that notwithstanding watching the sections of this film where Wilson was going, haltingly at times, full blast at others   and using every sound under the sun that made sense and of the now famous “wrecking crew” of sessions musicians I got the musical genius part. Of course that was an age when a lot of people, a lot of musicians as well, got as caught up in the whole live fast, die young and make a good corpse syndrome as anybody else. Some went under to drugs like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendricks and Jim Morrison, other faded after their moments in the sun, and still others like Wilson let their inner demons get the best of them.  

The reasons those demons took command was never really explained, if such things can be explained except an overbearing father, less that sympathetic brothers and an overwhelming to create the greatest album ever took their toll. Then we get to see Wilson in the 1980s when he is frankly a basket case although the direct causes for that decline are not sketched out. What is sketched out very clearly is that his shrink, his mad man over-the-top shrink who seemed to have imbibed every hare-brained psychological theory from the 1960s and put it on top of a control freak persona, was the problem not the solution. Also sketched out very clearly was that a determined woman is a very hard thing to beat when the love game is in play as when his future wife Melinda (played by Elizabeth Banks) digs in her heels to break the shrink’s spell over Wilson. I didn’t come away from this film any more a fan of the Beach Boys but for his struggles against adversity I did become a fan of the musical genius Brian Wilson. Watch this one.