Love and Mercy

Before seeing this pretty much all I knew about Brian Wilson came from the Barenaked Ladies song Brian Wilson; that he lay in bed for a few years and gained a lot of weight. I think I heard that he was a paranoid schizophrenic somewhere too. I like The Beach Boys, but I’m not a superfan or anything, which is probably the perfect position going into this movie; I knew enough to be excited and know all the songs but not enough to notice any factual inconsistencies, or actually properly know what Brian Wilson looks like.

So here you have two different actors in two different time periods playing the unhinged pop genius, Paul Dano in the ‘60s making Pet Sounds while his mental illness is getting worse his and John Cusack in the ‘80s, over the worst of his paranoid schizophrenia but trapped under Dr Eugene Landy who is over supervising his entire life, at one point denying him a burger at a barbecue because he only ‘thinks’ he’s hungry, and generally being really creepy and shouty, as Paul Giamatti does so well (so well in fact that I really don’t like him, I guess only because he’s so good at these ‘jerk’ roles that I now believe him to be a jerk; he’s too good).

This is the most I’ve seen John Cusack have to do in a movie and it’s probably his most impressive performance; he’s so vulnerable while being simultaneously enigmatic you can see why Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) falls for him. Paul Dano was fantastic too, and more how I imagine Wilson, an extremely gifted, funny and eccentric, boyish man. Dano had the more enjoyable scenes in the film, where you see all the madness in the studio as he frantically and obsessively runs around, part cheerleader part conductor, much to everyone’s amusement. These bits were was so well filmed, shot on super 16 so they look grainy and like real home movie style footage (I think they even used actual footage from back then), albeit very well crafted home footage with stunning camera work. 
This movie really captured the spirit of Brian Wilson and I left the cinema smiling like an idiot, I loved it