Paul Dano plays Wilson as a twenty-something, and John Cusack portrays Wilson as a middle-aged man. Throughout the film, director Bill Pohlad, a Minnesotan, switches from '60's scenes to the '90's. Here is the nugget of advice: If you are distracted by the facts that Dano does not resemble Cusack and Cusack does not resemble Wilson, you need to pay more attention to the other facets of the film in order to "get the most out of it." At least there is a similitude between Dano and the young Wilson.
Brian Wilson was and remains one of the most fascinating characters in the history of the music industry. If ever there were a genius in the pop music realm, it was he, a thesis driven home by the documentary The Wrecking Crew (reviewed here on April 28, 2015; A-). Brian and his two brothers, along with a cousin and a close friend, formed the Beach Boys in Hawthorne, California. Almost every single they released from 1962 to 1966 became a smash. The most frequent themes were those of surfing, sports cars, high school and, of course, girls. Their harmonies were rich, the beat was usually uptempo, and their lyrics resonated with teens nationwide, even those in the landlocked Midwest. Many young fans, including me back in the day, figured these guys grew up on the beach and were natural-born surfers. The truth, as we later found out, was that Hawthorne is landlocked too, separated by a few busy highways and LA suburbs from the ocean, several miles away. And of the five bandmates, only drummer Dennis Wilson surfed.
Although Brian is a genius, he was psychologically tormented. His struggle with mental illness is the focus of this movie. The film does not purport to explain the cause of his problems, but the presence of two misguided, if not evil, superior males were exacerbating factors. As children the Wilson brothers were beaten by their father Murry (Bill Camp), a tyrant both in terms of their upbringing and their fledgling careers. A blow administered by Murry to Brian's ear left him partially deaf. Of even deeper concern and more illustrated in the film is the presence of a court-appointed psychotherapist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Landy is determined to control every aspect of Brian's life, including his diet, his medications, his residence and his social life. Landy is a one dimensional character who clearly sees Brian as his meal ticket. Landy uses round the clock surveillance to keep his "patient" under his dominion. By exerting a ridiculous level of control over him, particularly with respect to his regimen of overmedicating, Landy easily has the vulnerable Brian at his mercy. Every scene Landy is in is difficult to watch.
Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, a former model turned Cadillac salesperson, who first encounters Brian in a dealer's showroom. She does not know that the male customer examining the innards of a Caddy is the music legend. She is fascinated by Brian's quirkiness and simple honesty. The more she is around him, the more suspicious she becomes over his relationship with Landy and the latter's motives. While in the presence of Melinda, Landy attempts to disguise his domination over Brian, but she is an astute observer whose hunches about the unnaturalness of the Landy-Wilson relationship are accurate.
The Beach Boys' music became much more experimental in the mid-sixties. Wilson was fascinated with the Beatles' Rubber Soul album, released in December 1965. The Beatles had decided to take their music in a different direction than the pure pop style which had lifted them to fame. Rubber Soul was their vehicle to do so. Brian wanted his band to follow a similar path, and 1966's Pet Sounds was the result. Those two albums are universally considered masterpieces by music historians. Another parallel one can draw about the two bands is that the Beatles stopped touring within nine months of releasing Rubber Soul, and Wilson abandoned touring to devote more time to writing and producing near the Pet Sounds chapter of the Beach Boys' reign. One important difference between the new paths charted by the Beatles and the Beach Boys was that all four Mop Tops were on board with the transcendence, whereas Brian's change of direction caused internal dissension among the group.
I was hoping for a little more Beach Boys music on the sound track, but given Pohlad's narrower focus of concentrating much more on Brian than the band itself, the smaller sample size of tunes is understandable. Dano displays acting chops I never knew he possessed, while Banks and Giamatti strike the right notes in their performances. Cusack was a good call to fill the role of the older Brian. His characters always seem to be at least a touch off dead center; in this film, way off.
One has to
wonder how Landy's emotional abuse of the mentally ill music man could
go unnoticed by others who were close to him, such as Brian's bandmates,
other family members, his professional colleagues and court personnel.
It took a car salesperson to discover what was going on.
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