{"id":1026,"date":"2015-08-09T13:53:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T17:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/?p=1026"},"modified":"2015-08-09T13:53:31","modified_gmt":"2015-08-09T17:53:31","slug":"review-love-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/review-love-mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Love & Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make: I\u2019ve never listened to Pet Sounds<\/a>\"Love-Mercy_poster_goldposter_com_4\". At least not as an album; Looking over the track list, I have heard a lot of the songs, and a couple of them would be at the top of my list if somebody asked me to name the best Beach Boys songs. But my relationship with Pet Sounds has mostly consisted of hearing it praised by musicians and people who write about music, thinking \u201cI really should listen to that,\u201d and then not doing it because I have trouble taking the Beach Boys seriously. I enjoy the occasional Beach Boys song, but it\u2019s got such a \u201cthrowaway pop\u201d vibe that\u2019s it\u2019s hard to think of them as anything more than a very early boy band. I mainly went to see Love & Mercy because I usually enjoy biopics and because there aren\u2019t a whole lot of bad Cusack movies. Plus, Giamatti.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good movie. Cusack, Paul Dano, and Elizabeth Banks are all very good and Giamatti does a great job transitioning from obviously kind of a scumbag to the unquestioned villain of the piece. I\u2019m not sure it really counts as a \u201cbiopic,\u201d though. When I left the theater, I didn\u2019t really know much more about Brian Wilson than I when I bought the ticket, and there\u2019s really not a lot of \u201cbio\u201d to it.<\/p>\n

As you probably know from the trailer, Dano and Cusack play young and old Brian Wilson. The Dano half of the film picks up when Wilson stopped touring with the Beach Boys to focus on writing and producing, completely skipping over the early years and the band\u2019s rise to fame. While this avoids some of the musician biopic cliches, it\u2019s kind of unusual for a biopic to start at the height of the artist\u2019s success without backtracking to fill in how he got there. Instead, the \u201cearly years\u201d part of the movie sticks mostly to the recording and release of Pet Sounds, with some early hints at Wilson\u2019s developing drug problems and mental instability.<\/p>\n

The Cusack half of the movie is pretty much a combination of love story about Wilson meeting his second wife Melinda Ledbetter (Banks) and his escape from the clutches of Dr. Eugene Landry (Giamatti). Landry is Wilson\u2019s legal custodian and is micromanaging his life, keeping him heavily medicated, and basically trying to take him for everything he\u2019s got. Luckily Melinda (with some help from the maid) manages to find the proof that Wilson\u2019s parents need to challenge Landry in court and by the end of the movie Wilson is mostly functional again.<\/p>\n

The main problem is that so much of Wilson\u2019s life \u00a0just isn\u2019t covered, and a lot of it is the stuff that seems like it would make for a great movie. Namely the part where he was a complete mess wandering around in his bathrobe and offering drugs to his kids and hanging out with Charles Manson. Or how about giving some context for the Cusack half of his life by showing some of Wilson\u2019s early relationship with Landry so we have a better idea of how this guy managed to take over his life?<\/p>\n

In Love & Mercy, Wilson\u2019s \u201cmissing years\u201d remain missing. Wilson goes from misunderstood genius to victim to survivor, conveniently skipping the part where he was either deeply disturbed or completely out of control (or more likely, a little of both). Leaving that out not only cuts out that \u201cmiddle\u201d part that my high school English teacher told me stories were supposed to have, it makes the movie feel sanitized, like it was written by Wilson\u2019s publicist or something.<\/p>\n

Despite the odd choices about what parts of Wilson\u2019s life to cover, Love & Mercy is a completely enjoyable movie. The scenes with Dano-Wilson putting together the album, with the music going from barely recognizable (or unrecognizable) noise to instantly-recognizable Beach Boys songs will make me listen more closely to the instruments the next time I hear a Beach Boys song; I\u2019ve always thought of their music as being more defined by the vocals. I might even finally get around to listening to Pet Sounds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a confession to make: I\u2019ve never listened to Pet Sounds. At least not as an album; Looking over the track list, I have heard a lot of the songs, and a couple of them would be at the top of my list if somebody asked me to name the best Beach Boys songs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,37],"tags":[29,31],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","category-reviews","tag-movies","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1028,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions\/1028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}