Review of Love & Mercy (2015) by Harry W — 04 Jul 2015

Though The Beach Boys were never a band I was that familiar with, the talented cast caught my eye.

By the end of Love & Mercy, The Beach Boys were still not a band I was familiar with. In actual fact, the film is hardly a biopic about the band whatsoever, more a piece about the mental state of Brian Wilson Frankly, I could not have been more bored. After walking out of Love & Mercy I had no desire to learn anything more about The Beach Boys, and that remains to this day because I found that Love & Mercy depicted them as a band with nothing interesting going on.

The story is about Brian Wilson, and it's approach to the subject matter is far from conventional. But it's even further from entertaining. I'm used to biopics having familiar stories and conventional plot elements, and quite frankly I'm not that entertained by seeing the same story again and again. Love & Mercy made me miss every generic music biopic I had ever seen because the approach that Bill Pohlad takes to the subject matter is more and experimental than John Ridley's fictionalised story about Jimi Hendrix's life story in Jimi: All Is by My Side, ultimately coming off as far less entertaining.

The film is so emotionally distant that it's difficult to feel anything for it or get sucked into its drama. In actual fact, any time drama did enter the film I was surprised because when the rest of the film is so dull, any slight spark of drama draws one in. That's the case in Love & Mercy. But the actual dramatic scenes in the film are so few and sporadic that the effect is absolutely minimal, and most of the time the power comes solely from the performance of Paul Giamatti and nothing else. The rest of the time. Love & Mercy is just a painfully slow film with less entertainment value than a televised standby logo from a DVD player.

The structure is key in establishing the lack of entertainment value. The fact that the film is already so dull is one thing, but it is made worse by the fact that Love & Mercy insists on cutting back and fourth between Brian Wilson's life when he was young and when he was in the 1980's. This means that the film cuts between a series of repetitive conversations from one narrative and shots of Paul Dano staring around with a blank face. A lot of the film is made of these shots of Paul Dano as the sounds heard are nothing more than echoed screeches meant to leave implication in regards to Brian Wilson's paracusia. A film which goes between these two dull elements with a slow pace and little drama is not an entertaining one, and so the lack of developing narrative in Love & Mercy is not assisted by it at all. In actual fact it even gets confusing at times because any connection between chronology and reality is absolutely lost in Love & Mercy.

But the screenplay itself is also an ultimaet source of flaws. Since it doesnâ??t put any story into the film, you would hope that it puts dialogue in. What little dialogue there is proves to have minimal insight into the characters at all. I mean, the intro depicts an extensively slow conversation between Brian Wilson and Melinda Ledbette regarding the purchase of a vehicle. This goes on for what feels like forever, and the many conversations they later share are of little more interest than this. The dialogue between the characters is so boring that I became further isolated while not entertained to any greater degree. I honestly just hated this film, it was such a drag.

Even the talented array of cast members end up with little to do.

The cast member with the most critical acclaim is Paul Dano, and this is slightly understandable. I donâ??t know how well he actually played Brian Wilson and I donâ??t care to find out after seeing this film, but the way that he captured an otherworldly mental state really emphasizes his emotional instability on a powerful level. Paul Dano does a strong job isolating his mental state from the world around him, predominantly through both his echoing voice articulation and his directionless facial gestures. Paul Dano hasnâ??t go much of a character, but in terms of achieving the emotional state of Brian Wilson he certainly has insight into how to depict mental instability.

John Cusack doesnâ??t have much effect though. John Cusack is an actor I really admire, and his restrained approach to the character matched the mood of the film really well. The problem is that the mood is dull and the things he speaks of are not interesting, so the haracter is really a boring one. John Cusack is stuck with a blank character and plays him as such, so I hardly place any blame on him. The same effect happens to the perfrormance of Elizabeth Banks because I love her as an actress, yet she has to tone her natural charisma down below even the most restrained dramatic standards which ultimately proves to leave her stranded in one of her most forgettable roles to date. But I have no less respect for her as an actress.

Paul Giamatti was the most memorable of the cast for me. He is the only one with any truly dramatic moments, and the scenes where he goes into psychotic bouts of anger are intimidating and really stand out from the atmospherically blank nature of the rest of the film. He has moments of acting with the best intentions before striking the audience with unprecedented rich emotional tension. Paul Giamattiâ??s few moments on screen are the highlight of the film for me, and it just reminds me of his strength in even the most boring of dramatic feature films.

So Love & Mercy is a long, slow and repetitive drag with uninvolving drama, a boring script, a senseless structure and an atmosphere which is just plain blank.