‘Love & Mercy’ Doesn’t Do The Beach Boys The Justice They Deserve

LOVE & MERCY

Love & Mercy is a rock-biopic told in two parallel narratives, at distinct time-frames. In one half, you get a character study of Brian Wilson in the ’80s, the former Beach Boy (played, in that era, by John Cusack) a washed-up schizophrenic, lorded over by a bonkers therapist cum micromanaging guru cum shyster (Paul Giamatti). Along comes Elizabeth Banks’ righteous blonde —with shades of the White Knight heroine— a love-interest who helps him break out of his personal/psychological prisons, and inspires him return to the stage. This half is essentially a study of cycles of abuse, and how difficult it can be to break them. Giamatti’s therapist is not only reminiscent of Wilson’s domineering, drunken, violent father, but his legal guardian; this another film about a rocker with daddy issues.

The familiar presence of the disapproving dad —cue Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox’s enduring meme: “the wrong kid died!”— leads into the film’s other half, which is overloaded with familiar rock-biopic tropes. That’s the half where Paul Dano packs on the pounds and gets a bowl cut, depicting Wilson at the peak of his compositional powers, making 1966’s legendary Pet Sounds. That’s where the character study turns to clichés, as each piece of overdetermined dialogue crams in making-the-album factoids, studio-musician CVs, and telegraphed moments of inspiration; and, eventually, our heroes has his artistic/psychological breakdown.

Given it’s, y’know, Pet Sounds, the music is awesome; and Dano has clearly listened to the endless Beach Boys outtakes, and captures the tenor of Wilson at work, wrangling French horns and barking dogs and treated piano and bicycle horns. But they’re pretty cheap pleasures, akin to a kind of cinematic coverband, where actors play dress-ups and recreate newsreel footage and recording sessions. And, once the music stops playing, these cheap pleasures almost instantly fade away. Which is symbolic of Love & Mercy’s divided drama as filmic whole: it’s, essentially, a portrait of an unforgettable album that’s utterly unmemorable.

Far From The Madding Crowd

If the great cliché of the period-piece frock-movie is that it stars a woman-out-of-time, then does Far From The Madding Crowd have a heroine for you. “I have a piano, I have my own farm, I have no need of a husband!” she rebuffs one particular suitor; you-go-girling through Victorian England. Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century Independent Woman Pt.2, Bathsheba Everdene, can be shaded different ways —in John Schelsinger’s 1967 film, Julie Christie played her as a proto-hippy— but, here, Carey Mulligan, and in genuinely great turn, plays her not just as headstrong and defiant, but practical, self-aware, and thoughtful; essentially a proto-businesswoman, instead.

It’s an inspired choice in a film that, otherwise, plays out like a particularly artful romantic soap-opera. Mulligan’s lady farmer must weight up the romantic affections of three men: sexy, earthy, bearded shepherd Matthias Schoenaerts; gruff, wealthy landowner Michael Sheen; and rakish, dickish, moustachioed soldier Tom Sturridge.

Whenever Sturridge swaggers onto screen, the film can’t escape its melodramatic source text; when he (read the book, spoilerphobes) comes back from the dead to demand Mulligan give him money to pay off his gambling debts, it’s hard not to laugh.

But Danish director Thomas Vinterberg —the guy who made the iconic Dogme movie Festen, the amazing trainwreck It’s All About Love, and then rehabilitated himself with The Hunt— shoots the film beautifully; using natural light sources, often in lowlight or twilight, and being unafraid to plunge into darkness. The film inhabits its rural setting, be it with realism or lyricism; equal parts dirty and sunkissed, desperate and mannered. There’s a low ceiling for classic-lit adaptations (unless, of course, you’re Andrea Arnold radically remaking Wuthering Heights), and Vinterberg bumps up against it; this Far From The Madding Crowd thoughtfully-adapted, handsomely-photographed, and excellently acted.

Madame Bovary

The title character of Gustave Flaubert’s 19th-century novel has long proved a beloved tragic heroine, readers —and filmmakers— drawn to the realist portrait of a woman suffering under the stultifying convention and isolation of country living and wifely duty. But for her downward spiral to register as tragedy, she probably has to be less of a cunt than she is in Sophie Barthes’ screen adaptation. In an awful performance, Mia Wasikowska —who’s done classic-lit time, previously, as Jane Eyre— plays her with an endless frowny-faced scowl, an annoyed-teenager’s indignance, and a weird Transatlantic accent.

Barthes (who previously made the B-grade Charlie Kaufman impersonation Cold Souls) is a French expat living in America, so the kind of vaguely-international, non-denominational approach to the casting makes some kind of sense. But the mish-mash of accents — Paul Giamatti and Ezra Miller softening their Yankee accents into something quasi-period-piece-ish; set against Rhys Ifans’ sing-song Welsh, and Henry Lloyd-Hughes’ toffee English— feel hugely disappointing after a beautiful, near-silent opening; in which Wasikowska’s days of proper-lady grooming and Catholic guilting at a convent are presented in a succession of brilliant images. When she gets hitched to Lloyd-Hughes’s country doctor, and at the wedding the drunken revellers speak French, and her dad, Dardennes staple Olivier Gourmet, heavily accented English. The film is shot on location in France, and oft employs natural light; but, soon, any designs on naturalism are lost.

When Barthes communicates through pure images —like an amazing hunt scene, with flocks of beagles and bloodhounds dashing through the dawn light— there’s something here. But when anyone opens their mouth to speak, or when director and cast are forced to grapple with drama or emotional nuance, the film turns stagey, unconvincing, uninteresting. Wasikowska, in particular, takes what should be a complex, contradictory, conflicted role and makes it dull, eye-rolling, revolting.

Once Wasikowska becomes a bored missus, her religious devotion and simple-country upbringing are lost in dreams of upward mobility and social climbing. She becomes a horrible trophy wife, one of the Real Housewives Of Normandy. She singlehandedly drives her household to ruin through an obsession with frocks and drapes, sleeps around, and, eventually, meets her tragic demise. For you to deem this Madame Bovary a success, said tragic demise would have to ring as a tragedy. But having watched Wasikowska scowl and frown through an increasingly-dreary drama, her foretold-upon-opening death comes as a thankful reprieve.