Review of Love & Mercy (2015) by Andy G — 26 Jul 2015

This was a good movie, but I had high expectations and the film failed to meet them. There were a few reasons for this.

1. This was essentially 3 movies in one -- a movie about a young Brian Wilson, at the top of his game; a movie about an older Brian Wilson, a sad shell of his former self; and a documentary on Pet Sounds. It's very hard to put together 3 good movies in a single film.

2. Because there was so much to cover, there was little time for character development and most characters came across as boring and one-dimensional. Mike Love was an annoying, difficult obstacle to Wilson's creative genius; Ledbetter was a purely saintly figure; Landy was entirely evil. Characters are more interesting when we understand their motivations and see things from their side. But this movie was mostly caricatures, not characters.

3. John Cusack was a poor casting choice. He looked like he was playing John Cusack, not Brian Wilson.

4. Hopping back and forth between the 1960s and 1980s didn't work for me. I would have preferred that the pre-credit sequence simply show us a "flash forward" to Brian Wilson in his 1980s, incapacitated state, so that the viewer knows where the film is going. After that, the movie could have focused solely on the young Wilson until the point of his post-Pet Sounds breakdown, then say "20 years later.".

This was still a fun movie to watch, and the Pet Sounds studio sequences were worth the price of admission alone.