17 Temmuz 2015 Cuma
Opening today at a multiplex near you:
ANT-MAN (Dir. Payton Reed, 2015)
The first time I was introduced to Ant-Man it was in an old Saturday Night Live sketch from the late '70s. Margot Kidder was hosting at the height of the success of the first SUPERMAN movie so they did a sketch with her reprising Lois Lane in the premise of hosting a party with the man of steel (Bill Murray) as her new husband. Dan Aykroyd showed up as The Flash, John Belushi made quite an applause-filled entrance as The Hulk, and extras came in dressed as Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, The Thing, etc.
Then there was Garrett Morris (SNL cast member from '75-'80) as Ant-Man, who was mocked mercilessly by The Flash and The Hulk. “He has the strength of a human!” Aykroyd’s Flash joked. I honestly thought at the time that they had made up the character for the sketch - it was a while later that I found out that he'd been around since the early '60s.
The gag that Ant-Man is one of the lesser superheroes is one that still endures. Paul Rudd, who takes on the role as the tiny crime-fighter in the new comic book blockbuster wannabe opening today, said on LIVE with Kelly and Michael this week that compared to the rest of the Marvel family he felt like “cousin Oliver to the rest of the Brady bunch.”
It’s just that sort of self-deprecating comic charm that Rudd has in spades that helps elevate ANT-MAN from the all-too familiar formula makes it one of the most fun films of the summer.
The movie opens in the late ‘80s with Michael Douglas, who with the help of make-up and CGI looks like he did when he won the Oscar for WALL STREET, as Dr. Hank Pym storming in on a S.H.IE.L.D. meeting angry because they've been trying to reproduce his shrinking technology without his knowledge. Pym, who was the original Ant-Man in the comics, resigns from the agency and takes his formula with him.
Cut to 25 years later where we meet Paul Rudd as master thief Scott Lang as he's being released from prison. Rudd's Lang doesn't want to return to a life of crime, but a stint at Baskin Robbins gets cut short because they learn about his record. Lang is desperate to see his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson), but his ex-wife (Judy Greer), who is now married to a cop (Bobby Cannavale), forbids it until he can pay child support so he takes on “one last job” with his old cohorts (Michael Peña, Tip “T.I.” Harris, and David Dastmalchian).
This involves breaking into a vault made out of the same metal as the Titanic, but all that's in there is Pym's old Ant-Man suit. Lang tries it on when he gets home, presses a button on it and is shrunken to, yep, the size of an ant. The amped-up experience, which results in a scene that comes off like HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS on acid, scares Lang into returning the suit, but this gets him arrested.
In jail, he's visited by Pym posing as his lawyer. Pym had set him up because he's chosen Lang to be the new Ant-Man, and with the help of the suit Lang breaks out. Pym's daughter, Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) isn't happy with this, but goes along with geting Lang in shape to help them pull off a major heist.
Pym wants Lang to steal the dangerous garb duplicating his shrinking technology dubbed Yellowjacket, which was developed by his former protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stohl from House of Cards).
From there it becomes the expected mix of fight scenes, surreally-tinged chases, and comic asides, which all breeze by without an instance of clunk.
As Cross, Stohl isn't the strongest villain, and the plot mechanics can feel pretty standard at times, but thanks to the wit, charm, and likability of Rudd, a
well executed origin story, and a strong supporting cast (funnily enough, it's Peña who gets the most laughs), ANT-MAN is a welcome, and far from lesser, addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Back when Edgar Wright (SHAUN OF THE DEAD, SCOTT PILGRIM VS.
THE WORLD) who was originally slated to direct dropped out of the project and
was replaced by Peyton Reed (director of the definitely un-super rom coms DOWN WITH LOVE, YES MAN, and THE BREAK UP),
it looked like it could end up a bomb, but the result is a summer superhero
movie that satisfyingly pops.
Wright is credited for co-writing the screenplay, along with Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Rudd, so a lot of his vision is happily intact, and with a running time of under 2 hours, it's the least bloated Marvel movies in ages.
Rudd plays well off his fellow cast members, especially Lilly, who appears to be primed to have her own superhero character soon, The Wasp, and Douglas, who, like Robert Redford in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, has one of his juiciest parts in recent memory. There's also a cameo by one of the Avengers, but I won't tell you which one. There's maybe more than that if you stay to the stinger at the end of the credits, but, again, that's all I'm gonna say.
Rudd also plays well off his CGI-ed insect pals, which Ant-Man can communicate with, and his affection for a winged carpenter ant he names Antony is cute in a way that only Rudd can pull off.
ANT-MAN is a delightful ride through yet another franchise starter, and a fine finish to Phase Two of the MCU. All that, and it's got a cameo by Garrett Morris in it too. Coincidence?
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Opening today at a multiplex near you:
TRAINWRECK (Dir. Judd Apatow, 2015)
In his fifth feature, TRAINWRECK, Judd Apatow gives comedienne and Comedy Central star Amy Schumer her first starring role, and he let her write the movie too.
This is a first for Apatow as he wrote or co-wrote his previous films (THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, KNOCKED UP, FUNNY PEOPLE, and THIS IS 40) but his confidence in Schumer’s filthy, feminist brand of comedy shines through, maybe a little too much, as like with all of his other movies, it could’ve been edited down considerably.
Schumer plays New Yorker Amy (no last name given), a writer for S'Nuff, a snotty men’s magazine run by an eccentrically unhinged editor-in-chief hilariously portrayed by an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton.
In a cold opening/flashback, we learn that Amy was taught by her father (longtime comic Colin Quinn in his best screen role) that “monogamy doesn’t work,” so we learn up front why her life consists of a series of one night stands. In her voice-over narration she tells us that she is actually seeing somebody – a lughead body builder played by WWE superstar John Cena – but, of course, not exclusively.
After getting dumped by Cena when he finds out, Amy surprises herself by developing actual feelings for a sports doctor (ex-Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Hader) she’s assigned to do a story on. However, initially she treats it like just another one night stand.
Hader, in one of his most grounded in reality roles, winningly keeps up with Schumer’s wisecracks. Their courtship is convincing, even when we can see the conflicts that will have them breaking up from a mile away.
The New York setting is another first for Apatow, but as expected he fills it with a bunch of recognizable faces like Dave Attell as a homeless guy that lives outside Amy’s apartment building, SNL’s Vanessa Bayer as one of her co-workers, current indie “it” girl Brie Larson as her settled down sister , Mike Birbiglia as Larson’s husband (Schumer was in comic Birbiglia’s SLEEPWALK WITH ME), and Ezra Miller (PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER) as an eager young intern at the magazine.
But most notably there’s LeBron James as a version of himself, one of Hader’s patients, who does his amusingly droll spin on the advice giving best friend.
Schumer and Apatow embrace many rom com tropes here, mostly taken from the ANNIE HALL rulebook. The twist is that usually it’s the male who’s the commitment-phobe who has to make the climatic mad dash to win back their love when they finally realize what they want.
We know Schumer’s boozy, pot-smoking, slutty character will be redeemed by the end, but the question is are there enough laughs along the way to make it worthwhile?
The answer is yes – there are a lot of genuinely funny moments throughout TRAINWRECK, but, as I mentioned before, it’s longer than it should be. It clocks in at just over 2 hours, when this material could’ve been shaped into a tidy 90 minutes – the ideal length for a comedy imho.
It’s like they couldn’t bear to cut anything that got a laugh out. In the aforementioned mad dash, they even work in a subway cameo by SNL’s Leslie Jones. It is funny, but it’s got “deleted scene” for a latter Blu ray/DVD release written all over it. So does a lot of shtick here (most of the Cena stuff should've been cut - no offense, Mr. Wrestling Champion).
But the best stuff is comedy gold, and there’s a warm and touching undercurrent to the proceedings. Schumer’s exchanges with Hader, Larson, and especially Quinn as her ailing father help flesh out that feeling.
TRAINWRECK will make Schumer fans happy (I'm one and I left the theater smiling), while turning a lot of newcomers into fans. It’s as flawed as its protagonist, but it brings the funny again and again and that’s way more important.
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15 Temmuz 2015 Çarşamba
EX MACHINA
(Dir. Alex Garland, 2015)
It’s time to take a break from all the summer sequels and highly hyped blockbuster wannabes clogging up the multiplexes, and take note that one of the best films of the year, Alex Garland’s sleek, dark sci-fi thriller EX MACHINA drops this week on Blu ray and DVD. Despite critical acclaim, it quietly came and went in theaters early this year, but I bet it’ll build its deserved audience quickly on home video.
Domhnall Gleeson (HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PARTS I & II, ABOUT TIME, FRANK) plays Caleb Smith, a programmer at the Google-esque internet search engine giant Bluebook, who wins first prize in a companywide lottery. This entitles Caleb to a week’s stay at the home of the company’s reclusive CEO, located on his vast mountain estate (location never specified, but filmed in Norway).
In another solidly intense performance, Oscar Isaac (head shaved, but sporting a bushy beard) portrays the CEO, Nathan Bateman, who tells Caleb in their first meeting that his impressive compound of glass, stone, and shiny surfaces isn’t a house, it’s a research facility. After he gets him to sign a non disclosure form, Nathan reveals to Caleb that he’s built an android with Artificial Intelligence and that he wants Caleb to be the human component in the Turing Test - “when a human interacts with a computer, and if the human doesn’t know they’re interacting with a computer – the test is passed.”
Caleb is introduced to the AI, Ava (Alicia Vikander), who via CGI has parts that are transparent, and their sessions begin. Caleb speaks to Ava through a glass wall of an observation room, and, of course, develops an attraction to her. Nathan monitors their conversations on surveillance cameras, but during a power outage (something that happens often, Nathan explains) Ava warns Caleb that “Nathan is not your friend.”
There are other red flags that Nathan, who’s constantly boozing it up, is a modernized version of the classic mad scientist character –he’s hacked into the cell phones of billions, the contest was a smokescreen for this experiment, there is footage of other AI models desperately (and destructively) trying to escape , and he may have programmed Ava to flirt with Caleb.
There is only one other cast member - Kyoko, a Japanese housemaid (Sonoya Mizuno) who speaks no English but definitely has some dance moves as we see when a yet again drunken Nathan tries to get a party going with she and Caleb.
The directorial debut of screenwriter Alex Garland (28 DAYS LATER, NEVER LET ME GO, and DREDD) EX MACHINA is sharply constructed – there’s not a misplaced line, shot, or story beat and Geoff Barrow and Glenn Salisbury’s eerie electronic score effectively connects it all together.
Gleeson’s role is similar to his part in FRANK – a smart ambitious guy who gets way in over his head trying to be a part of something grand – but his acting is more focused here. His nervous exchanges, playing off of Isaac’s rich genius cockiness, give the film its humanity. However it’s the kind of humanity that may seal our race’s doom.
It's easy to see why Gleeson's Caleb would fall for Vikander's alluring Ava, even when he's trying to keep in mind that she's a machine, albeit sentient. Vikander tops off the trio of terrific performances, and makes the viewer go through their own personal take on the Turing Test as well.
It builds brilliantly from an intriguing think piece into a thriller, that’s both psychological and technological, with an ending that floored me then stuck around to haunt me for days. This is cerebral film making of the highest order – Stanley Kubrick, who Isaac says in one of the bonus features that he patterned his character after, would’ve loved it.
Special Features: The 5-Part Featurette “Through the Looking Glass: Creating EX MACHINA,” 8 Behind-the-Scenes vignettes, and SXSW Q & A with cast and crew that's intermittently interesting if you've got an hour to kill.
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10 Temmuz 2015 Cuma
Opening today at an indie art house near you (and a few multiplexes):
You will really get to know the face of the late, great jazz singer Amy Winehouse well before the end of this biodoc which details the rise and decline of the “little Jewish kid from North London with a big talent,” as her brother Alex described her.
Apparently from when she was a teenager to her tragic death at age 27 in 2011 from alcohol poisoning, somebody was filming her constantly. There’s so much in-her-face footage that at times it can make you feel like you’re in the chair across from her, hanging out.
This is ideal in the early stretches of the film, in which the bubbly, funny, and extremely talented performer is just starting out, poised on the verge of becoming a major top-charting, award-winning sensation. Of course, we get less face-time when the story grows dark as her battles with booze, drugs, mental health, and bulimia begin to overtake her musical career.
Director Asif Kapadia, whose previous film was another excellent biopic - 2010’s SENNA, about Brazilian motor-racing champion, Ayrton Senna - constructs Winehouse’s narrative out of tons of archival video, film, and photos (much previously unseen), connected by excerpts from over 100 interviews with family, friends, and fellow musicians. Interviewees include her first manager and mentor Nick Shymansky, childhood friend Lauren Gilbert, The Roots’ bandleader Questlove, producer Mark Ronson, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), and Winehouse’s bodyguard, Andrew Morris.
Throughout AMY there is a healthy, welcome amount of performance material. The songs we witness Winehouse singing live in clubs and working on in the recording studio are treated with great import via individual lyrics in handwritten fonts being superimposed on top of footage, and often nearly complete versions of key tracks.
One of the most endearing moments in the movie comes at the 2008 Grammys. Winehouse wasn’t at the event in L.A. but was going to perform on a live feed from Riverside Studios in London. Winehouse’s monster hit “Rehab” was up for Record of the Year, and we watch her listen to Tony Bennett (one of her idols), and Natalie Cole read the nominees for the category. When Justin Timberlake’s name and song is announced, Winehouse makes a face, and snarkily asks “His song is called ‘What Goes Around…Comes Around?” So great to get that little insight into what she thought about Timberlake, and to see her bug-eyed shock at winning the award seconds later is priceless as well.
Speaking of Bennett, there’s an affecting segment of the jazz legend working with Winehouse on the duet “Body and Soul.” Winehouse, in total hot mess mode, is having trouble getting her vocal right, but Bennett soothes the situation with understanding warmth. You completely believe Bennett when he says that she’s “one of the truest jazz singers I ever heard. Up there with Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.”
Winehouse’s ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil sure comes off sketchy here – the guy introduced her to crack cocaine for Christ’s sake! Infamous photos of the couple covered all bloodied and bruised that appeared in tabloids in 2007 speak scary volumes.
Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father, doesn’t come off much better; we see him in footage from 2005 say his daughter didn’t need to go to rehab, and then in 2009 he tried to cash in on her fame with a reality TV show – we see Amy get highly irritated that he invited a camera crew to follow them around when she was on vacation in St. Lucia. It’s no wonder Mitch is threatening to sue.
It’s devastating to see Winehouse losing the battle with her demons, while she was being ridiculed by the brutal British press and American late night comedians – we get a sampling of the jokes at the time by such luminaries as George Lopez and Jay Leno.
She may have had a look stolen from Ronnie Spector – down to the beehive hairdo and Cleopatra make-up – but Winehouse had an amazing voice that was all her own. That she only left us with a couple of records (2003’s “Frank” and 2006’s “Back To Black”), some random outtakes, guest appearances, and a smattering of live recordings, when there should’ve been decades of stellar work, is still hard to process, even four years after her death.
See this incredibly moving and illuminating biodoc, one of the best of its kind, and you’ll get a really good idea how seriously heartbreaking a loss this really is.
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19 Haziran 2015 Cuma
Now playing at a multiplex near you:
INSIDE OUT
(Dirs. Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen, 2015)
Pixar’s entry into this year’s summer event movie sweepstakes is one of the trusty animation studios’ most purely pleasurable productions.
Its strengths are many: it’s not another sequel, it has an incredibly solid comic cast headed by Amy Poehler, it’s a dazzling display of colorful concepts, it has the right amount of light, the right amount of darkness, it’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, and it has a much better female-centric scenario than BRAVE.
Most of INSIDE OUT takes place inside the psyche of an 11-year old girl named Riley, voiced by Kaitlyn Dais. We learn right off the bat that there are five emotions behind the control panel of Riley’s mind: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, which are respectively personified by Poehler, Phyllis Smith (best known as Phyllis from The Office), Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling (another Office alumni), and Bill Hader (Poehler’s former SNL co-star).
When Riley and her parents (voiced by Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco, Sadness starts to affect her core memories (represented by glowing orbs which are gathered on shelves in a vast long-term storage library). These core memories power personality islands – i.e. essential components of Riley’s identity – with names like Friendship Island, Hockey Island, Goofball Island, and Honesty Island, which are connected to the central control room via thin bridges.
Joy tries to stop a sad core memory of Riley crying in front of her class on the first day at her new school from becoming part of her being, but ends up getting sucked with Sadness, and other core memories, through a vacuum tube and deposited into the far reaches of the ever-growing more despondent girl’s mind.
So Joy and Sadness have to make their way back to headquarters, which is faltering due to Anger, Disgust, and Fear being in charge. Joy and Sadness journey through realms such as the Center for Abstract Thinking, Imagination Land, and Dream Production, but most significantly they encounter Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend, Bing Bong, adorably voiced by Richard Kind.
Bing Bong, a hot pink hybrid of elephant, cat, and dolphin outfitted with a porkpie hat and bowtie, who cries hard candy, is eager to help the stranded emotions get back by way of the Train of Thought though Riley’s subconscious. Meanwhile, the identity islands are collapsing, and Anger plants the idea to have Riley run away back to Minnesota in a misguided attempt to fix things.
Poehler brings a can-do gusto to her lead role of Joy that would make her Parks and Recreation character Leslie Knope proud, while Smith’s Sadness gets to do more than just amusingly mope through – her developmental arc is key. The remaining emotions have their funny moments, especially Black’s red hot Anger, whose concern for learning curse words is a great running gag. I wouldn’t have minded more of Kaling and Hader’s takes on Disgust and Fear, but maybe less really is more.
As for the outside of Riley, Lane and MacLachlan provide a grounded parental presence – we get to see inside their heads in one of the film’s funniest scenes – that we see in flashes as being as stressed in adjusting to the move as their daughter. Dias does a good job as the everygirl Riley, wonderfully capturing the awkwardness, confusion, and pain that any kid and adult can relate to.
INSIDE OUT is on par with the best of Pixar. It maybe doesn’t scale the heights of Docter’s previous masterpiece UP, but that it gets so close is reason to rejoice. Its screenplay, courtesy of Docter, Josh Cooley, and Meg LeFauve, definitely re-establishes the studio's high standards of humor, invention, and emotional pull that had gotten a little misplaced in one too many sequels (that one being CARS 2).
As usual, the obligatory 3D presentation didn’t do much for me, but I was glad that I had the glasses on throughout as they helped to hide how much I kept tearing up. Consider every heartstring pulled.
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12 Haziran 2015 Cuma
Now playing at a monster-sized multiplex near you:
JURASSIC WORLD (Dir. Colin Trevorrow, 2015)
There are only two plot points in every JURASSIC PARK movie. They are as follows: #1. There are dinosaurs – that’s amazing! #2. We must now get the Hell away from them.
It’s been 22 years since the highly praised first film in the franchise which was based on the 1990 Michael Crichton bestseller, and 14 years since the heavily maligned third entry, but those same elements are strongly intact in this fourth installment.
They just added some new faces on top of the premise that we’re now dealing with a fully functioning theme park, and a new hybrid dinosaur designed to wow the kids because, as park operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) puts it: “Let’s face it, no one’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore.”
This “new” adventure concerns Claire’s nephews (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) coming to visit Jurassic World at the same time that the ginormous hybrid breaks free and, you know, starts killing people and other dinosaurs.
The idea to create this highly intelligent, extremely dangerous animal dubbed the Indominus rex for the purposes of marketing a new attraction is criticized by the park’s buff raptor wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who leaves all his lovable Chris Pratt-isms (see Parks and Recreation, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) behind to play a generic bad ass hero character complete with lame wise-cracks.
Meanwhile, the villain this time is the head of the park’s private security force portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio, who wants to use the dinosaurs for military purposes. The moment he starts spouting out his evil disrespectful to nature rhetoric, we know we’re gonna see him getting eaten later.
There’s also the useless mystery of what dinosaurs the Indominus rex is a hybrid of. We are told that its base is a T-rex, but the rest is classified, so throughout the movie Pratt is trying to together that puzzle.
But, of course, nobody cares about that flimsy connective tissue. What people are coming for is the mayhem with dinosaurs attacking tourists, kids narrowly escaping grisly deaths, and lots of CGI-ed spectacle, and it’s all here in set piece after set piece.
There are lots of call backs to the Steven Spielberg-directed original too, including an appearance by the old, crumbling Jurassic Park’s visitor’s center (complete with the same old jeep), holograms of the most memorable creatures such as the Dilophosaurus in the new fanged visitor’s center, and B.D. Wong, the only returning cast member from the first film, as Dr. Henry Wu, the chief geneticist, who could be seen as the film’s other villain.
There is some comic relief in the control room via Jake Johnson (New Girl) and Lauren Lapkus (Orange is the New Black) as frightened engineers, but very little of the film’s humor really takes hold.
JURASSIC WORLD is a fast paced ride, which will surely please hardcore fans of the franchise, and folks looking for a few hours of air-conditioning, but it’s just another pile of dinosaur shit, one that, at times, doesn’t look that different from last year’s GODZILLA reboot.
The monster mash-up that is the Indominus rex is just a much bigger T-rex, Pratt’s and Howard’s characters could have been played by anybody, and D’Onofrio's by-the-numbers bad guy is a crude bore (he's a much better villain on Netflix's Daredevil series).
And as much as composer Michael Giacchino cribs from John Williams’ original score to accompany sweeping shots of the island and theme park, that old Spielbergian sense of wonder just can’t quite be summoned.
I will say that the film does serve up a crowd pleasing climax, one that really roused the audience at the screening I attended, but that alone doesn’t elevate this tired material much.
That it took four screenwriters - Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly, and director Trevorrow - to come up with this supersized retread may the only genuinely shocking and hair-raising thing about it.
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5 Haziran 2015 Cuma
Now playing at an indie art theater near me:
LOVE & MERCY (Dir. Bill Pohlad, 2015)
I was really skeptical of when I first heard about this project, a biopic of Brian Wilson in which he’s portrayed by Paul Dano when he’s young and all mixed up in the ‘60s, and John Cusack when he’s middle-aged and all mixed-up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
The stills and footage that were initially released showed that there was a lot of attention paid to Dano’s look via his hair and wardrobe made to make him look like prime period Wilson, but the pics of Cusack, well, they just looked like Cusack. No attempt to make him look like Wilson in his 40s with a salt-and-pepper pompadour or anything. It’s just Cusack with his jet black hair, wearing shirts he’d normally wear like he just walked on to the set and refused to take part in any hair and make-up nonsense.
It’s a lot like how Cusack appeared as Richard Nixon in Lee Daniels’ THE BUTLER a few years back. Despite a little bit of a prosthetic to elongate his nose, Cusack still just looked, and mostly acted (he made a slight attempt at the disgraced President’s accent) like himself.
It’s odd as Cusack has had a rocky career of late, walking through a bunch of sad direct to VOD releases, and not even appearing in HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2, the sequel to the last movie he made that could reasonably be called a hit, so you’d think he’d change his look a little here to play the iconic singer/songwriter/producer.
But maybe the point in producer turned first time director Pohlad’s adaptation of the life of Wilson is that he shouldn’t have to. It’s like Todd Haynes’ I’M NOT THERE, the abstract 2007 biopic of Bob Dylan in which 7 different actors played Dylan at various points of his career. The themes, thoughts, and tones from the times that enhance the non-stop music are the focus, not whether whoever looks like the actual person.
That said, the most effective scenes in LOVE & MERCY, which takes its name from a track from Wilson’s 1988 self-titled solo album, are the ones in which the floppy haired Dano as the 20somethng Brian toils away in the studio making his ‘60s pop masterpieces “Pet Sounds” and SMiLE.”
The movie, which was co-scripted by Oren Moverman, who co-wrote I’M NOT THERE not coincidentally, moves back and forth from Dano’s Wilson in full genius mode to Cusack’s burned-out Wilson who’s under the control of corrupt psychotherapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti chewing the scenery to bits).
Both versions of Brian (or “Bri” as his fellow brothers and bandmates call him) have their villains. Dano has his father Murray Wilson (Bill Camp) and Mike Love (Jake Abel) on his back about making more conventional, commercial music (in protest Brian exclaims: “We’re not surfers - we never have been - and real surfers don't dig our music!”) while Cusack has the evil, oppressive Landy thwarting his every move to have a normal life.
And a normal love life via Elizabeth Banks in a warm, winning performance as Melinda Ledbetter, former model turned Cadillac saleswoman (they have a meet cute at her dealership), who sees pretty quickly that Giamatti’s Landy is a horrible influence on the beleaguered Beach Boy.
Melinda witnesses the creepy doctor’s methods – made creepier by Giamatti’s bug-eyed intensity - under his oppressive 24-hour a day supervision. Landy, who we see in a pivotal scene berating his patient for eating a hamburger without permission, eventually forbids the budding relationship between Melinda and Brian. Melinda then starts phoning members of Wilson’s family, and doing what she can to rescue Brian from Landy’s clutches.
This is well-acted, well executed stuff, but the real heart of the film is in the recreations of the studio sessions in the ‘60s. It’s apparent that filmmaker Pohlad, and screenwriters Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, have studied every bit of footage, noted every instance of studio chatter, and absorbed every bit of the multi-disc box sets, and bootlegs of “Pet Sounds” and Smile” material. They also earn points for depicting and paying respect to “The Wrecking Crew,” the group of top notch session musicians that took endless notes from Brian on how to arrange his “teenage symphony to God,” but not calling them by that name as it was applied much later.
Dano and Cusack both do good work in embodying the tortured artist that has heard voices in his head in 1963, but it’s Dano who nails the young Brian’s angsty ambition. And, like I said before, it helps that he actually resembles Wilson. While Cusack puts in one of his most lived-in performance in ages, I still had to remind myself that he was playing the same person as Dano.
LOVE & MERCY is a much better than average musical biopic, because it’s more concerned with capturing the psychological essence of its subject than it is with a formulaic greatest hits approach – although its soundtrack is prime period Beach Boys tracks blaring from start to finish. The casting may be a bit mismatched, but the vibrations it picks up, both good and bad, all resonate extremely deeply.
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