Beach boy on the rocks: How genius Brian Wilson was tortured by drugs and a brutal shrink - but survived with the love of a great woman 

By Libby Purves For The Daily Mail

Published: 20:00 EST, 9 July 2015 | Updated: 22:53 EST, 9 July 2015

Love & Mercy (12A)

Verdict: Gripping, classy rock bio-pic

Rating:

The Choir (PG) 

Verdict: Sentimental, feelgood and predictable 

Rating:

Brian Wilson wrote the song which names this film. When he sings ‘Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight’, the Beach Boys star and composer knows what it’s about.

Rock music biopics are often sycophantic, romanticised or blandly juke-box, but director Bill Pohlad has a remarkable story to tell about Wilson: of creative frenzy, rising madness and devilish exploitation.

His creativity is musical, and sounds evoking mental disturbance swarm eerily beneath it in a brilliant soundscape: there are moments which have you shivering in your seat, transfixed with pity and fear for the singer. Add a nasty streak of villainy, classic remembered tracks and the iconic beauty of the Californian seafront, and the film stands among the best in the genre. Good vibrations indeed.

The cast of Brian Wilson's film 'Love & Mercy' which focuses on two period's of his life - with two actors playing the singers part

The cast of Brian Wilson's film 'Love & Mercy' which focuses on two period's of his life - with two actors playing the singers part

It concentrates on two periods in Wilson’s life, with two actors playing the singer’s part.

First the late Sixties, when the sunny hits were declining and his brothers and bandmates feared for their commercial survival, increasingly irritated by their most gifted member’s drug-fuelled eccentricity.

Young Brian is Paul Dano, moon-faced and troubled, endearing and enraging, tormented by the need to break away from bubblegum pop hits with brilliant experimental harmonies. His exasperated brother shouts: ‘What are you, Mozart?’

Pohlad weaves this in with scenes 20 years later, as a more battered John Cusack takes the star’s part.

Wilson has broken down and been committed to the care of the unscrupulous Dr Eugene Landy (a therapist later barred from practising).

Confused and exploited, he lives under constant surveillance.

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack star as Melinda Ledbetter and Brian Wilson in the movie

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack star as Melinda Ledbetter and Brian Wilson in the movie

Landy is a slimy, bullying shrink, and Paul Giamatti’s performance is apparently so true to life that the real Wilson says he flinched on seeing the film.

Landy wrongly diagnoses the singer — addled by drugs — as paranoid schizophrenic, overmedicates him and exerts often brutal authority, policing every moment and mouthful of food.

The film focuses on the influence of Melinda, a car saleswoman who manages to befriend Wilson while Landy’s back is briefly turned. She becomes instrumental in his rescue.

This is a fine, restrained performance by Elizabeth Banks: Barbie-bright and scarlet-lipped with a core of kindly sense and steel. The real Melinda is now Wilson’s wife; the singer stabilised mentally and returned to music, winning multiple awards. To see the real man perform Love & Mercy over the end titles is almost shockingly moving.

The sequences of musical creation are brilliant: it feels like a privilege to watch the intense orchestration of ‘pocket symphonies to God’, desperate perfectionism warring with confused visions.

You stop noticing that the two actors are different people: Dano carries in his face both the torment and the exaltation of the young man, and Cusack’s middle-aged Brian has a ragged spaced-out desperation. His cowering from Landy is plain horrifying.

As the friendship with Melinda develops, Banks demonstrates, without overdoing it, the young woman’s fear, compassion, attraction, horror and determination.

Her scenes with Landy are superb: she polite and nervous, he bearing down with horrid perception on her own vulnerabilities.

Anyone who has ever worried about a friend over-influenced by a therapist will shiver; so will anyone who has seen a fragile person succumb to the ‘godlike’ visions of hallucinatory drugs.

The first part of the film focuses on the late Sixties, when the sunny hits were declining and his brothers and bandmates feared for their commercial survival

The first part of the film focuses on the late Sixties, when the sunny hits were declining and his brothers and bandmates feared for their commercial survival

The film focuses on the influence of Melinda (right), a car saleswoman who manages to befriend Wilson while Landy’s back is briefly turned. She becomes instrumental in his rescue

The film focuses on the influence of Melinda (right), a car saleswoman who manages to befriend Wilson while Landy’s back is briefly turned. She becomes instrumental in his rescue

There is very different music in The Choir. If you want lovely sounds, a spiky but good-hearted Dustin Hoffman, a sweet small boy and a feelgood-by-numbers plot, look no further.

Francois Girard’s film tugs the heartstrings with robotic precision.

Stet, an angel-faced Garrett Wareing, loses his hopeless mother to drink.

His distant, panicky father has a preppie new family, whom he keeps in the dark about Stet’s existence, and bribes a prestigious choir school to take this secret son, despite his musical ignorance and bad record.

The school is very Hogwarts: a 6am call, pastoral neglect, and precocious 11-year-olds harmonising Zadok The Priest in the showers and trilling lines such as: ‘I’m Raphael, call me Rafi, I’m late for Polyphony’.

You can guess what happens The other kids are horrid then supportive? Check!

Stet comes good, leads the choir, sings Handel and melts hard dad’s heart? Check!

The main teacher (Hoffman) is cranky yet inspiring, driven by past disappointment?

Young Brian is Paul Dano (pictured), moon-faced and troubled, endearing and enraging, tormented by the need to break away from bubblegum pop hits

Young Brian is Paul Dano (pictured), moon-faced and troubled, endearing and enraging, tormented by the need to break away from bubblegum pop hits

Tick that box, too. No surprises. But do you want any? Not with all that Faure and Handel and Renaissance motets.

The only mild amazement is that the real elite Boychoir School at Princeton doesn’t mind the impression that such a school is open to bribes, doesn’t check whether a new kid can even read music, and fails to notice that no one collects him at the end of term, so he spends Christmas in an empty school practising Faure and living on cereal.

But hey, it’s a fairy tale.

Especially the father’s change of heart, and the improbable failure of his long-deceived wife to bean him with a frying-pan.

 

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