Every now and then, on Twitter or Facebook, I find myself referring to something I really enjoyed as “genius” or “a work of genius” or “pure genius.” Why do I do this? After all, I don’t actually think Richard Benjamin’s performance as an unhinged Jewish Van Helsing in the 1979 Dracula parody Love at First Bite is “genius.” I think it’s hilarious and unexpected and that Benjamin’s turn raises the movie’s comic game. But it wasn’t a perceptual or scientific or creative leap that thereafter changed the world, which is what real genius truly is and truly does.
I suppose by using the word, I want to make clear the outsized degree of my enthusiasm for the thing I’m commending. But there’s also an element of ironic mockery, both of myself and of the very thing I am celebrating; in some sense, I am devaluing my opinion and the object of my enthusiasm through deliberate overpraise.
So I am an offender when it comes to the flip and inappropriate use of the word “genius.” But what about when the word is used unironically in the wrong way? The question comes up because of a very interesting new movie called Love & Mercy, an impressionistic biographical portrait of the singer-songwriter-musician Brian Wilson, whose claim to pop-culture immortality comes from his work nearly 50 years ago as the leader of the Beach Boys.
Told straightforwardly, the Brian Wilson story is fun and sad and melodramatic and uplifting and maddening: He was an abused child of the postwar California boom who had phenomenal success very young with insanely catchy music but was seduced by personality-altering drugs that may have brought about or deepened a case of paranoid schizophrenia. Finally, in his 40s, he pulled himself out of a pit, in part through the love of a good woman.
But Love & Mercy operates from the presumption that Wilson is a genius whose exquisite sensitivity made it impossible for him to function in the wider world and literally drove him mad. He is the Vincent van Gogh of rock ’n’ roll, an obsessive and tormented original. Intelligently written by Oren Moverman and beautifully directed by Bill Pohlad, Love & Mercy wants to offer us nothing less than an understanding of Wilson’s sensibility and the workings of his supposedly extraordinary brain.
It breaks up his life into two parts and weaves them together. In the mid-1960s, barely out of his teens, kid phenom Brian writes hit after hit before breaking loose with a somewhat experimental album called Pet Sounds and then falling to pieces as he tries to record a follow-up called Smile. In the mid-1980s, after 15 years of drug-addled despair, middle-aged Brian begins courting a Cadillac sales-woman. She discovers that he lives under the dominating sway of a Svengali psychologist named Eugene Landy, whose method of treatment is basically to be Wilson’s jailer, and sets out to rescue him.
The film’s great innovation is to have Wilson played by two different actors: by the uncannily odd Paul Dano as a young man and by the rueful John Cusack as the older man. Both are superb, in different ways, and together they serve to make the movie’s point that Wilson was literally a divided soul.
But does Wilson deserve the van Gogh treatment? If you asked my 5-year-old son, whose favorite song since toddlerhood is “Surfin’ USA,” he would certainly say yes, even though he has no idea who van Gogh was (or who Brian Wilson is). But despite its conviction about Wilson’s genius, Love & Mercy shows that Wilson was, at his best, a kind of inspired technician of music—able to conceive wondrous harmonies, chord progressions, and unusual and memorable sounds, and execute them with voices and instruments in a recording studio.
The best scenes are about the making of Pet Sounds, and what we see is an immensely skilled man working obsessively and creatively at the top of his craft. But still, in the end, it is a craft. And that was evidently not enough for the young Wilson. Indeed, it was in part his desperate ambition to prove himself not a craftsman but an Artist (in the form of the aborted Smile) that helped hasten his breakdown and effectively ended his career as a major contributor to American popular culture.
Wilson’s craft made him very rich and beloved, and it led him to write and record songs people will surely enjoy as much a century from now as they did a half-century ago. Craftsmanship is a wonderful thing, and it’s a pity our common hunger to elevate those we love and admire to the level of genius runs it down.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
