From the Last Row, On the Aisle:
Banksquet
24 June 2015

Hallelujah! Elizabeth Banks has finally made the movie that Seabiscuit promised us, over a decade ago. Since then, Banks has made lots of movies, some of them very good, but none of them as grand — as grand for her — as Seabiscuit was. Her part in that film wasn’t all that big, but it showed her strengths, mainly a smile that took us far beyond the rapture of beauty, all the way to heaven itself: forgiveness, redemption, and a jolly good time.

Love & Mercy is something of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. There are two casts, but, more, there are two approaches to filmmaking. As you no doubt know, Love & Mercy tells the Brian Wilson story in two parts; how well these parts fit together, only time will tell. A gifted pop singer alienates his fellow Beach Boys with elaborate musical ambitions. (“Who are you, Mozart?” one sneers. Well, sort of.) And he goes mad. Director Bill Pohlad treats us to many, many scenes of Paul Dano, his stand-in for Wilson and an actor who has made a specialty of borderline alienation, looking bereft by a swimming pool. Beyond bereft. The irony of the comfortable but hostile California climate is enough to give you a sunburn.

Eventually, the poor fellow takes to his bed. After an implied hiatus, but actually in the first scripted scene — Love & Mercy refrains with Puritan rigor from providing the narrative with helpful timestamps — Wilson is played by John Cusack. This Wilson is the prisoner of one Dr Landy, a predatory psychologist, armed with legal custody (and the right to institutionalize our hero), played with creepily bug-eyed monstrosity by Paul Giamatti. Dano and Cusack do not look violently unalike, but they share little in the way of a resemblance. (Their noses! How hard would it have been to conform noses?) But instead of getting in the way, the particular facial discrepancies of these particular actors do a good job of embodying the utter devastation of Wilson’s early promise. Whereas Dano endlessly circles the drain of adolescent self-pity (nobody understands him!), Cusack has the air of a superannuated raptor, his eyes still clear enough to convey his regret at being unable to sustain ordinary human conversation. He is a prince laboring under a terrible spell. It is Elizabeth Banks’s job to rescue him.

Scenes from these very different segments of Brian Wilson’s life are intercut, making nonsense of any attempt to talk about “the first half” and “the second half.” I would therefore fall back on “the Dano half” and “the Cusack half,” except that the latter is really “the Banks half.” The Dano half of the movie is a rather weedy study of artistic obsession: we’re made to feel almost as bored and irritated as Wilson’s entourage. Plus, the self-pity. The Banks half is entirely different, the smashing update of a stylish Forties cliff-hanger (I Wake Up Screaming, with Betty Grable). Melinda Ledbetter (Banks) sells Cadillacs, and she is as suave as her showroom. Like any successful salesman, she is a very good listener, and, as a Cadillac salesman in her particular part of Los Angeles, she is accustomed to eccentric customers. When the rather shabby but focused middle-aged man asks if the two of them can just sit in the car for a while, and they close the doors and he locks them, she knows just what to say: “Now we know that the automatic doorlock works.” Only when his keeper and associated goons catch up with him does she learn who he is. She is instructed by Dr Landy to get started on the paperwork; Wilson leaves her a card on which he has inscribed a terse plea for help. She agrees to go out on a date with him anyway. She agrees to a second date, even, despite the chaperones who tagged along on the first. Only when they are out on a yacht does Ledbetter realize that Wilson is always under surveillance.

Like Seabiscuit‘s Gary Ross, Bill Pohlad showcases Elizabeth Banks’s strengths, only this time the result is a film-school case of Studio-era stardom. Repeat after me: the camera loves Elizabeth Banks. She is a blonde this time round, a blonde than whom only Kim Basinger is moreso. And she dresses not like a salesman but like a salesman who happens to be a slim, beautiful woman who sells Cadillacs in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. She dresses well. Even her garden apartment is snazzy. Gloria Grahame could be shooting In A Lonely Place in the next building. But Banks is not marmoreal, as the Forties goddesses tended to be; however well put-together, she’s spontaneous. She can think on her feet, by which I do not mean that she can come up with clever things to say. There is no call for cleverness here. What Wilson needs from Ledbetter is kindness, confidence, and a certain wily reserve — the lady knows from the start to keep her voice down. The situation with Dr Landy is so gruesome that Love & Mercy climaxes as something of a thriller, and the silent facedown between Giamatti and Banks is worth the price of ten tickets. This is not a film for men who believe that pretty girls need protection.

During the Dano half of Love & Mercy, I reflected on American popular culture, which erupted into the full daylight of public attention with acts like the Beach Boys — and, although no one but they themselves was conscious of their rivalry at the time, the Beatles — in the early Sixties. In the movie, it is observed, enviously, that Rubber Soul is an album — all of one piece. I remember being electrically aware of this at the time. I remember arguing, as a tyro student of art history, that Rubber Soul marked the Beatles’s passage from Archaic prehistory to Hellenic perfection. (Come on, that’s what college is for.) I remember reading that Brian Wilson was uninterested in stereophonic sound because he was deaf in one ear; I didn’t know that he was deaf in one ear because his father beat the crap out of him and his brothers. I remember grasping — this much more recently — that Wilson was alone among Americans in sharing the British passion for choral richness. And I reflected, as I surveyed the ghastly Sixties milieux that affluent Southern Californians inhabited in those days, that America not only did nothing to support its creatives but, on the contrary, constantly tempted them into deeper lunacy.

Eventually, Paul Dano’s Brian Wilson complains that he cannot go back to writing the kind of songs that made the Beach Boys famous. “We were never surfers, we never played in the sun, we never dated beautiful chicks” — or words to that effect, ie, that the Beach Boys were beautiful fakes. “Fakes” would be a harsh word. I think that they were transfigurations. They captured and represented the exhilarating apotheosis of American mindlessness. They showed why a healthy young man would want to replace his brain with a comb. (My favorite song, in 1963, was “Be True to Your School,” which sublimely drank the blood of its rah-rah vitality.) Love & Mercy does not look into any of this. The party is over before the Dano half begins. Love & Mercy is, so far as an actual band is concerned, a monument to Pet Sounds.

During the Banks half of the movie, I salivated. Oh, not in any coarse, carnal way. (I’m a happily married man!) But my impassioned longing for the cinematic splendor of Elizabeth Banks was gratified so generously that I may, in my senility, confuse Love & Mercy with a singularly memorable meal.