Brian Wilson biopic: Love and Mercy

I didn't realize they used 16mm for the 60s scenes.. Good to know. Those beach scenes did look different

 

It'd be interesting to cut together just the 1960s scenes to see what kind of a (short) film that would be. Might be an interesting weekend project.

 

I saw Brian and the band play Smile on the same tour, and he encouraged the audience to laugh during the Barnyard sequence - he said "hey people, this is supposed to be funny", which brought some scattered laughter.

I feel certain that if not for Darian Sahanaja and the Wondermints, that Smile 2004 and the eventual release Smile Sessions never would have happened.

 

It would be interesting to see for sure. That said, I can't help but be reminded of when they spliced the first two 'Godfather' films together, and edited them chronologically, thereby eliminating the transitions between the DeNiro scenes as a young Vito and the Pacino scenes in the second film. It was blasphemy.

 

Darian is a hero of mine, he is one smart cookie. If he didn't have to scrounge for money, he could be another Lindsey Buckingham.

 

Remarkable film! The recreations of the mid/late 60s recording sessions are incredible.

 

I feel sorry for Brian; A modern-day Beethoven, and he was treated like s**t by those around him.

 

Coppola supervised and approved that version, so what you saw was what the director allowed. It's said that the director was terribly in debt, and so one reason he did this version was to get some quick cash. Coppola later pulled that version and it's no longer available.

 

I first saw the movies in that format during one of the two 1980 political conventions (age 13)... there was no other programming on network TV so the independent stations showed movies all week. It came as a bit of a shock when I watched them in their proper order a few years later.

 

Yes, thanks to Vidiot for that tidbit.

I just watched the BD last night and knowing this really enhanced my deep appreciation of what they accomplished in this remarkable film!

You new there was a switch to another time period just by this ultra-subtle shift in format. Just another reason why I think L&M should be lauded during awards season!

BTW - it's amazing how good the 16mm footage looked!

(Also - I noticed forum-member Peter Reum in the credits!)

 

Right. Brian has good, bad & better days - due to his condition. Rolling Stone had a great piece this year by a writer who spent several days with him, and went through all of them. Bottom line is - Brian wants to tour, even though he knows that he will sometimes have panic attacks.

His band most definitely got Brian to revisit SMiLE. Not only wonderfully recreating the music, but they got him over the immense emotional hurdle it had become for him, as documented in the Beautiful Dreamer documentary.

He became so overcome by it all, that he checked into a hospital. It was an enormous hurdle for him, and ultimately became the proudest moment of his solo years. Darian & co., deserve a lot credit as above & beyond musical comrades.

That story would make a great sequel to L&M.

 

The deleted scene of their version of the classic Help Me Ronda session is great ,not sure how they could fit it in the final movie

 

Huh.

I was looking forward to this and finally saw it today. Sad to say my first, second, and third impressions were that it was very much an average biopic. I'm a huge Brian and Beach Boys fan, but I never once got lost in the story, never thought of these actors for one second as anything other than Hollywood actors.

The storytelling seemed to me to make very odd choices: we heard more from Landy's lackeys than we did from Dennis, Carl, Al, and Audrey Wilson combined. Then there was the 2001 thing. Very strange.

In terms of movies about Brian Wilson, I much prefer I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. But even including that excellent film, haven't we read much better books about this stuff? Is it really necessary to see a bunch of actors pretending to be these guys? But, as this thread proves, I'm clearly on my own here.

 

I just cut all the 1960s scenes together for fun, and thought it told a very interesting story. You get a completely different impression of Brian Wilson's life seeing those sequences together chronologically, and I think it still tells an interesting story. There are gaps, but I think most fans can fill those in and understand how and why things happened in his life happened as it did.

 

You lost me at 'average biopic'.

this film breaks a lot of rules, and is anything but average.

Sorry, you didn't get it.

 

Wish they focused on the sixties more.
Landy 80s period was jarring.
Again' good TV movie.
Think the film is way overrated.

 

OK, I'll bite: what rules did it break that haven't been "broken" hundreds of times before?

 

The big ones are non-linear timelines. Two actors in the same role. Multi-media formatting (16mm film & Digital), using the original multi-tracks to create sound tapestries, just off the top of my head.

The latter is used most impressively to give the viewer an insight into Brian's internal world. Most depictions in film stop at giving us an external view of its characters. We never once went inside the psyche of, say, John Adams in that acclaimed biopic.

The only other one that comes close is A Brilliant Mind, but that picture relied on fantasy elements that may or may not have been true.

Here, we not only see what went on in the creation of Pet Sounds, Good Vibrations, and SMiLE, we get experience what it felt like from Brian's perspective.

That alone is enough to elevate this film above conventional biopics, but add in the dazzling performances by the four leads, (especially Paul Dano in an uncanny turn) and I think you have a very unique film that has staked out it's own turf.

 

I think what you call "breaking the rules" I would call "using conventions that other narrative films have been using for a couple of decades". Non-linear timelines, mixing of media types, use of multitrack audio to create new audio - we've seen this all before. That's not to say that one can't use those techniques to make a compelling film, I just don't think they've done that here.

My issues have less to do with the technical choices (whether rule-breaking or not) and more to do with narrative and motivation. Brian Wilson's story is an extremely complex and compelling one, with scores of interesting supporting characters. What makes it particularly interesting is how multifaceted those supporting real-life characters are. Love and Mercy introduces at least a half dozen of them - Eugene Landy, Carl Wilson, Murry Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Audrey Wilson all come to mind - without exploring any in a meaningful way. Landy is maybe the best example. The filmmakers decided to make the Landy episode a huge part of the narrative, but opted to make him a cartoon instead of exploring (or even explaining) the arc of their relationship. I imagine you know this, but while the whole word craps over Landy, Wilson is still able to acknowledge the positive influence Landy had on his life. Pretending that Landy didn't save Wilson's life - or his career, at the very least - is just naive and the film doesn't seem interested in that in the slightest. Dennis is another interesting one. While Brian talks to Melinda about his heartbreak over his brother's death at the beginning of the film, the "young Brian" portions of the film don't really show us anything about their relationship. Or his relationship with Carl, for that matter. These actors aren't playing roles, they're just serving as extras with a line or two.

But what's really stuck with me is how Love and Mercy is half about young Brian and half about Melinda. And, while that might make an interesting fictional narrative, they're purporting to tell a real story and, well, it just doesn't ring true to me.

I get why the masses are enjoying this film, but it does surprise a bit me that people who know a lot about Brian are enjoying it so much, especially given the fact that there's been so much great stuff written about this period. Just my opinion, of course.

 

Well I think the story of Brian Wilson is way too complicated to get every fact in during a 2 hour movie. So what is a film maker to do? Well he has to make a choice. So we get to see 2 fairly specific moments in his life. His 60s peak and subsequent fall and his 80s re-emergence. Both are arguably the most important moments of his story. And both are sort of sketches in a way because to delve into the exact minutiae would tend to undermine the human story at it's core. That Brian is a very talented and often misunderstood person who also has a very fragile psyche that is often under attack by people who either don't understand him, are jealous of his abilities or are opportunists looking to use him. His sensitivity which makes him so fragile is also seemingly the source of his greatest strengths... songwriting and producing.

It's rare I think to find a music biopic that needs to try to explain a subject who is so difficult to understand. Most are dealing with artists who have a fairly standard through-line. The typical rise, fall and redemption story of most Behind the Music episodes and most music biopics (Walk the Line, Ray, What's Love Got To Do With It) doesn't work here. It's more complicated. Luckily the story didn't end in tragedy like so many artists told in their biopics (The Buddy Holly Story, La Bamba, Elvis, Sid and Nancy, The Doors, Deadman's Curve). And while tv movie mini-series' and long form biopics like the chronological (but very good) The Temptations and even the 2 Beach Boy network movies do the best that they can to fit in all the details... they still have to make the story interesting even when it's really too complicated to tell every possible nuance in the group's history. And sometimes movies get fictionalized maybe too much to make the story more compelling (The Buddy Holly Story) or are completely fictionalized to give the gist of what the real characters went through or were about (Grace of My Heart, Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There).

So I think Love and Mercy kind of finds a sweet spot in telling a compelling story in an interesting way that makes it stand out from other music biopics while also being as close to accurate as possible without fictionalizing too much. That makes it a really good film to me.

But then again I get excited by music biopics and even ridiculous scenes like Anthony Michael Hall as Mutt Lange recording Def Leppard so maybe my standards are low.

 

Brian’s (and the group’s) story is complicated and one of the most compelling around. It would truly take a thousand-page book or a 5 to 10 hour documentary (or “biopic”) to really tell the full story.

Any Brian or Beach Boys film that runs 90-120 minutes that tries to cram even ten full years of the story in, let alone over 50 years, is going to be a total mess. “Love & Mercy” is successful and interesting as a film because it focuses on such a narrow set of timeframes and because it doesn’t bring in a ton of detailed characters.

What I’ve noticed in some discussions among hardcore BB fans is that they’re missing that this thing is a film first, not a Beach Boys product. They’re upset that “Friends” wasn’t mentioned, or that they didn’t feature a ton of songs from “Today”, or that Rocky Pamplin and Steve Love weren’t mentioned, or that certain things got conflated.

There are *oodles* of additional important information that the film could have imparted. But I think as soon as that stuff starts to get added, it would make the film too scattered and seem more imcomplete. I’m not saying every inclusion or deletion is perfect. But I don’t think another two minute scene of Brian and Marilyn would have made a huge difference. They could have very unambiguously had a character state that Landy did save Brian’s life initially. I think one could argue that was implied in the film, and certainly every fan knows that’s the case. But that would have led to stilted exposition the director probably didn’t want. And really, considering the hugely unethical, criminal actions of Landy over the course of nearly a decade, I don’t think they need to dwell on saying a few nice things about him. Truly, as cartoonishly villainous as they portrayed Landy in the film, they left almost all of the truly dark, stark, insidious stuff out of the film. The closest they got in the film was the one quick scene where Brian’s zonked out sitting at the piano. They didn’t dwell on the fact that *that* sort of stuff was allegedly going on *all the time*, for *years.* Nor did they dwell too much on the fact that a lot of Brian’s weird tics and problems in present day are because of Landy’s medicating during that time frame.

 

Very good points.

I guess, in the end, I'd ask why - given all the compromises needed - one would choose to make the film at all.

 

Because you've completely missed the point.

It's not about the Beach Boys. It's about Brian Wilson's genius/illness.

And there *is* a scene where Melinda states that Landy did save Brian's life. The problem was that he had then developed an unhealthy environment for him, with total control, manipulativeness, way too may drugs based on a bad diagnosis of his condition, and was getting into his personal affairs, rewriting his will, grabbing writer/producer credits, etc. almost all of it was out of bounds in California.

It's the most important part of his life - the losing of control in the '60's, and the long road to regaining it in the late '80's.

TV movies abound about the BB's, and they suck. This is heavy ****, and award-worthy film-making.

 

Nah, it's not "heavy ****", it's just a biopic. I'm glad you - and others - enjoyed it, but file it away with all the other biopics of years gone by.

 

All this 'back & forth'/ 'good-not-good' talk aside....
I was in it for the 'audio collage' of 'what Brain hears in his head'!
I stated before, it reminded me of an old episode of "Primetime Live", in which a schizophrenic woman tried to provide a recording of what she heard in her head..... it was quite chilling, and the attempt to 're-create' the same effect in the movie was, to me, the part that gets my respect.