In the late 1960s, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson stops touring, produces "Pet Sounds" and begins to lose his grip on reality. By the 1980s, under the sway of a controlling therapist, he finds a savior in Melinda Ledbetter.
22 Aug Love and Mercy (2014)
The Sergeant’s Retreat
The scriptwriter’s obligation is to sketch a world that has enough definition for us to inhabit and understand the influences on the characters within. The default is to make that world simple so we do the least work in engaging. That’s what they did here, based on the report of the actual people that lived what we see.
But just as the last people who should be designing a film are the actors, so too the last ones we should go to to understand genius are the geniuses.
The tragedy that is rolled out here is of a fragile mind surrounded by a beast of a father, uncreative collaborators, and an opportunistic thug given control. Into this sails a beautiful redemptress. The world here happens to be one of music, and we get that music to colour the world and make the movie pleasant.
But they missed two profound dynamics. I am unsure how they would have used them but I grieve their absence.
The first is that these kids were quite literally defining a world. It wasn’t tee shirts they were selling, or soap. Brian, with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney shaped how an entire generation encounter the world. I am in that generation; I was there on the receiving end. Folks today will have no idea of the power of what I was a part of, the freedom, the release from the past. In a postwar Cold War, everything had frozen. Music plays the role I guess that film and political celebrity does today but with less fresh power.
Most of us squandered this energy and freedom, but that should not take away from the effect of a few creative people over vast channels. Brian was important, and of the three, the only one who understood counterharmony as emotional ambiguity. I wish the film had captured that. Smile was a bridge too far with the collaborators he had, and the two versions we have both failures. Other side of the wind if you will.
The second thing I really must criticise is how they portrayed the damage to his mind. Here, it is supposed he had some basic defect, possibly from beatings, but more likely one of those neurological mysteries from birth. This was (in the film and most accounts) amplified by excessive drug use, including prescribed mistakes. That’s a simple story, and one we find over and over again. But I believe there is another governing dynamic at work. One I know from mathematicians. Math at the level maybe one or two people are capable of at any one time is literally mind-bending. Venture too far beyond the machinery we support and we break that machinery. I saw it nearly first hand with Nash. I’ve read about it with Voevodsky. I’ve seen it myself with at least one, possibly two I managed.
I believe that the drugs did contribute, but as enablers of a deeper process of creative insight that he was addicted to. His music was not intuited from a foundation of others. It was pulled from the unknown — and working in the deep blue unknown carries costs. He probably knew the costs, and without guard rails leaped into the sky. This we could celebrate in a film, but we did not. We just see the confusion of the husk.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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