Love and Mercy

Even with a happy ending, the story of the emotional travails of Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind The Beach Boys, is very sad. Wilson is played by two gifted and committed actors: Paul Dano, who plays him in his youth, full of creative exuberance and psychic hurt, and John Cusack, who plays him when he is older, depressed and being manipulated by psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, utterly evil and relishing the role). Both Dano and Cusack successfully convey a personality filled with layers of sweetness, eccentricity, wonder, fear, hurt and mental illness, and director Bill Pohlad achieves a believable continuum of character via his two wonderful actors.
The blond, sunny Beach Boys, poster kids for California insouciance, were the product of a deeply unhappy home, with an absent, alocholic mother and a physically and psychologically abusive father (Bill Camp). The extent of this man's monstrous pettiness is summed up in a scene in which young Brian plays him the masterpiece that was to become "God Only Knows", really one of the greatest pop songs ever written, and his father diminishes it in a virtuosic show of undermining.
The movie is structured as a back and forth between Wilson in the early eighties, when he had fallen prey to unscrupulous Dr. Landy, who overprescribed drugs and kept him away from his family, writing himself into Wilson's will, among other abuses, and Wilson at the height of his creative powers, when he came up with the album Pet Sounds, a masterwork that was ahead of its time and was not, like everyone wanted, yet another sunny Beach Boys hit.
The script by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner refuses to ascribe clear reasons to Wilson's mental instability. We don't know if he always heard voices, if he heard voices because his father used to smack him hard in the ear, causing him to lose some of his hearing, if his creativity already came with a dose of mental imbalance, or this was caused by the stress of being a misunderstood genius teetering between success and failure, the demands of his own creative ambition and other people's expectations. This, in a way is fine, since life doesn't always offer such neat explanations. Through today's science we now know that creativity and mental illness are sometimes physiologically intertwined and that emotional stress can have traumatic effects on mental health. In Wilson's case, throw in wild early success and an overly sensitive soul and you may well have a recipe for disaster. For another devastating real-life parallel of the damage toxic fathers can cause to their talented, sensitive sons see also the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Cobain's response to parental humiliation manifested itself in violently angry self-destruction which led to suicide, whereas Wilson was too meek a soul for anger. He preferred quiet obliteration through drugs and a three-year stint in bed.  Perhaps it is thanks to this mild disposition that he survived.
Wilson's father and his shrink provide destructive father figures, but the movie is anchored by the calming presence of Melinda Ledbetter (the excellent Elizabeth Banks), who meets Wilson cute at the Cadillac dealership where she works, and they fall in love. She discovers the abuse that the shrink is subjecting Wilson to and, with the poised tact and listening skills of a good car saleswoman, helps Wilson regain his life. Banks deserves awards for this performance, even if the showier and equally deserving roles belong to Dano and Cusack.
Accompanying this story are the cascading melodies of Wilson's genius, which director Bill Pohlad uses in snippets of Wilson's complex arrangements at the recording studio, in which we can hear their rich layers of melody and harmony separately in a sonic metaphor for the painstaking work of creativity. Composer Atticus Ross (Trent Reznor's collaborator for film soundtracks) also created sonic mashups of the noises and music in Wilson's head, which help us listen in amazement to the pristine, beautiful songs that eventually came out of him.

Maps To The Stars

The evil sister to Birdman, this bitterly vicious satire by David Cronenberg, based on a novel by Bruce Wagner, is happily, and like Cronenberg's best films, a movie about human horror. Maps To The Stars is about the needy, insecure, monstrously warped egos inbred by Hollywood culture, but in contrast to the genial Birdman, which is a feel-good movie in which vanity motivates creativity, Maps To The Stars is about egos so selfish and diseased they sow nothing but destruction.
The movie is at times clunky, the story and its symbolism are heavy handed and not clearly mapped out. The script strains to organize the complicated plot, in which the central metaphor is incest. The writing (the script is adapted by Wagner from his novel) is uneven. The satire is sharp but the plot is fuzzy. Still, Cronenberg meanders down extremely dark, uncomfortable places and summons his formidable capacity to shock.
More than just a facile look at Hollywood's notorious nastiness, Maps To The Stars is like a Freudian funhouse. It's a labyrinth of selves untethered by decency, empathy or common sense, that leads back to what made them sick in the first place, a recurring nightmare. Fame + Money = Crazy. Maps To The Stars makes Birdman look like a kiddie ride at Disneyland. The ignorant filth that comes out of the mouths of teenage actors in this movie makes the hacked Sony emails sound like they were written by Emily Post.
A spectacular Julianne Moore, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes, plays Havana Segrand, a hilariously vapid, damaged, prematurely fading movie star. Havana is the product of a traumatic childhood, courtesy of her dead movie star mother, who she believes or fantasizes, it isn't clear which, sexually abused her as a child. This being Hollywood, a remake is being made of the movie that made her mother famous, and of course, Havana wants to play her mom like a cat chasing its tail.
A hot mess of insecurity and narcissism, Moore is pitch perfect as an emotionally tortured character who boasts the casual cruelty of the utterly self-involved, complete with perky boobs and a perfect L.A. accent. She is scarily good. Havana is not the main character in the movie, but Moore steals it, and you realize how much you miss her whenever she is not onscreen. I am kind of freaking out at the Jungian implications of the same actress playing the Alzheimer's ridden neurosurgeon of Still Alice the same year as this crazy Hollywood bimbo. In my humble opinion, she won the Oscar for the wrong movie. Those endearing journalists from the Golden Globes got it right when they nominated her for both films. Not to take anything away from her sensational work in Still Alice, but her turn as Havana Segrand is an equally brave tour de force. She goes through every feeling, genuine and fake, known to man. She is, as they say in this movie, beyond.
An excellent John Cusack plays Stafford Weiss, a wealthy self-help guru who, in true self-help guru fashion, only cares about his book tour, even as his family collapses around him. Cusack approaches the phony he plays with icily controlled glee. Stafford gives expensive and painful massages and whispers psycho-spiritual mumbo jumbo to clueless stars who confuse his shtick with therapy.
Weiss has spawned a little monster, Benjie (the creepily good Evan Bird), a Bieber-like bundle of nastiness; a rotten, entitled kid who makes millions for his incompetent parents by working in crappy sequels and sitcoms. In comes the mysterious Agatha (Mia Wasikowska, excellent, as usual) all the way from Florida, with burn scars in her face. She lands a job as Havana's personal assistant, thanks to her close Twitter "friend" Carrie Fisher, who appears as herself in a perversely funny cameo. Down this Tinseltown rabbit hole everyone is connected, not only through schmoozing, name-dropping and other, more sexual activities, but by virtue of sharing the same nightmares and stories; by virtue of the ongoing incest between the movies, the lives, rehabs and deaths of movie stars, and the starfucking of executives, wannabes and audiences.
Cronenberg pulls no punches satirizing low hanging fruit like these Hollywood types, but as a master of horror he is not content with just skewering a town that skewers everybody for a living. There is something visceral in his judgement. What to make of Benjie's mother (Olivia Williams), who both pimps out her child and lets him abuse her, refusing to set a single lousy boundary? And she is not alone. Every adult is powerless around Benjie. This kid is a cash cow, hence he can be vile to everyone.
As comical as Havana is, her life is painful, lonely, full of drugs and debasement, even as she goes on eighteen thousand dollar shopping sprees.  The kids in this movie are so beyond help, it's actually shocking. Hollywood is shown to be such a den of iniquity that only violent, vengeful purification is in order. Maps To The Stars is a welcome addition to the wonderful genre of acid movies about Hollywood like Sunset Blvd., The Player, and Mulholland Drive, and if it's not quite as polished as these movies, it is deliciously disturbing.