Love & Mercy

Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy takes a touching look at gentle brilliance and the jealousy it unwittingly incites, the vindictive and the voracious perched to pounce, asserting themselves through dismissive abrasive cynicism.

Preying on the gifted.

The film romanticizes Brian Wilson's (John Cusack/Paul Dano) stealth, his steady patient creative orchestrations, the insights, the voices, the exacting yet understanding care playfully attached to his work, the fun humble spontaneous personality that nurtured love in those that could see his beauty, childlike wonder and awe maturely mastered to crystallize ecstatic movements, multifaceted maestro, coy imaginative visionary.

He faces three main challenges in his personal life, one that isn't too serious, another Beach Boy trying to (boringly) keep things simple, to move away from the experimental yet relatable path his force was cultivating (Brian writes everything so it's easy for him to ignore him although he becomes increasingly hostile), his father, who can't accept his exceptional success, who goes out of his way to brutally put him down, thinking he's regained control of the family by doing so, he can't let go, and a psychiatrist who traps him in a hellhole, controlling every aspect of his life, treating him like a spoiled two-year-old child, as opposed to a musical manifest.

There's a lot of pressure when it comes time for him to write.

A loving woman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), then enters his life and seeks to turn things around.

The legalities are daunting.

But she's full of angelic zeal.

It's a solid film, entertainingly profound, smoothly mixing the provocative and the popular, paying tribute to Wilson's legend in both form and content.

Examining his trials, his genius, his humanity, elevating the individual, critiquing the callous and the cumbersome.

He wrote everything.

He added layers upon layers of complementary sounds.

His genius still shines like seductive sweltering serenity.

And he was rewarded with contempt and isolation because of a mental illness.

That makes no sense.

None at all.

*I'm no genius, but I always did well in school when I applied myself and like what I come up with a lot of the time.

Although there's always room for improvement.

It's cheesy, but the trick to avoiding the destructive influences of jealousy is to love what you have, what you're doing, while still looking to change and grow, at different speeds, governed by circumstance, and be happy when you see that your friends like what they're doing too.

Works for me most of the time anyways.

Popsicles.